Towards the tail end of last week Google updated the capabilities of Google Pay a bit, and among the changes is the support of PayPal through Google Pay while paying for stuff at online merchants. To be clear, Google Pay has had support for PayPal at physical retail merchants for some time, the better of part of two years. Now though this is extended to places where you shop online that accept Google Pay as a form of payment.
This is great news if you use your PayPal account frequently enough and you would rather have money pulled from this account as opposed to directly from your cards. This isn’t just a great improvement for consumers though. Merchants are bound to see the benefits as well. There are certainly consumers who may choose to avoid buying from particular online merchants because they didn’t allow using PayPal through Google Pay, and now that the options available those consumers are likely to give online merchants a shot.
The ability to link PayPal to Google Pay is available in 24 different countries and this new integration for use with online merchants and not just physical retail stores is available in all of them, meaning merchants really already halfway there in terms of getting to the point where consumers are using their services.
One of the biggest benefits to this expansion for use with online merchants is time. This is going to save precious time for customers looking to checkout quickly. Hours? No. Minutes? Possibly, because if you have your PayPal account linked to Google Pay, you won’t need to sign into your PayPal account when buying things online when using Google Pay as your method of payment.
Realistically this might only shave off 30 seconds or so, but any time saved is time you can spend on other things, and who wouldn’t avoid signing in one less time if they were given the chance? This isn’t the only thing that makes this a gem of a feature though.
Because Google Pay lets you keep all of your payment cards in a single app you have a multitude of options for how you actually pay for things, and adding PayPal integration is just one more. Now when shopping online you can, on a case by case basis, choose whether you’d prefer to use your credit card, debit card, or even PayPal account since switching between them is pretty easy to do.
While this new integration is heavily focused on making things better from the merchant standpoint it’s an obvious boon for consumers too, especially if you’re used to selecting PayPal as the account that’s being drawn from. More options is never a bad thing, unless of course there’s really just too many options, but that’s likely not going to be the case here.
Since this integration was rolled out to online merchants last week on June 20, and because PayPal integration has been available in Google Pay for quite some time, users should already be seeing the option to use PayPal through Google Pay as a payment method at their favorite online merchants, though it obviously relies heavily on the merchant in regards to availability.