PayPal Expands Venmo, App Users Can Now Shop Online

PayPal announced Tuesday that it would be using its expansive merchant network to help streamline the use of Venmo for retail payments. Venmo has traditionally been used as a peer-to-peer payment app for friends to use to split the dinner bill, rent, drinks or any other expense they might share.

Venmo also made spending money a more social experience for users. “It’s similar to PayPal, but is unique in that Venmo allows users to share and like payments and purchases through a social feed. The service is popular with the millennial generation,” says PayPal’s description of the Venmo app. It has a feed where users can see which of their friends are paying others and what for.

Now the app is expanding to allow those users to use the app to make purchases as well as paying other users on the app. This expansion started last year, said a statement from PayPal, but is now expanding to far more merchants by using the PayPal network. The news addition of retailers will roll out starting this week and users will soon be able to use their Venmo accounts on their mobile devices to make purchases from more than two million retailers in the United States, said the statement.

Venmo became part of PayPal through the company’s acquisition of the startup Braintree in 2014. The company says that this change will benefit retailers looking to reach new shoppers, specifically millennials. This option will become available to millions of PayPal merchants without any necessary work for them. There will be a way for merchants to offer Venmo payments on their web platforms as well as in their app This can be somewhat confusing because it means some merchants might now offer both PayPal and Venmo as payment options. So the company is working on creating, “dynamically-painted payment buttons, which will show Venmo customers a custom dual-branded button that allows selection between PayPal or Venmo payment options,” said the statement.

How to use Venmo to shop online:

The new feature will be available with the latest update of the app and users will likely see an invitation to activate it when they open up the app after updating. When users browse or shop of a participating merchant’s website, they’ll see the option to use PayPal and once they tap that they’ll be able to choose Venmo. Users will get a notification of their purchase in the app and they’ll also be able to then share it or split it with their friends on the app.

The app also allows users to manage which sites have access to their Venmo payment information and offers a secure means to protect card and bank data, says a release from Venmo.