Users of the PayPal owned peer-to-peer social money platform Venmo will officially no longer be able to send or request payments via the website. Those functions have begun to be removed from the site as of June 15, following a company announcement pertaining to the change. Venmo had been a service offered by its parent company PayPay, after being acquired alongside Braintree back in 2013. It allows individual users to request and send payment with an option to link a PayPal account. According to the announcement, further changes will be made moving forward as the company scales the site and its features back. While the company’s operations since being acquired by PayPal have predominantly been focused in an app, that could ultimately result in a complete lack of web presence for the subsidiary.
However, support for those types of transactions will continue in-app. That’s according to messages which are reportedly showing on the website for users who have already seen the change. According to that notice, users will still be able to use the Venmo application for all of the actions previously available on the website through Android or its competing platforms. That seems to be a change which will stay in place for the foreseeable future. Although the move will likely be something of an inconvenience to some users, it’s hardly surprising. Maintaining the availability of those tasks both as a website and an app is much more costly and resource intensive than just an app. Since the availability and use of smartphones have grown nearly to the point of leveling off, it makes more sense to maintain the application rather than the website. Moreover, although technically a subsidiary of PayPal, Venmo is effectively in direct competition with that company.
For the meantime, the Venmo website isn’t disappearing either. Users will still be able to access their accounts in order to check their account activity history. The application, currently rated number three on Google Play in the Top Free Finance category, will take over the rest of the functionality entirely. As outlined above, that means users will be able to send and receive money as well as making payments at retailers, where available, via Venmo.