Payment with mobile, available via PayPal in UK high street retail stores

PayPal announced that its British customers can now use their smartphones and PayPal inStore app to pay at high street retail stores, as the service was launched on May 31st in UK and  will be available in 230 stores, including the ones owned by the Aurora Fashions group – Coast, Oasis and Warehouse – and Karen Millen.

PayPal inStore app is available for Android and Apple iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices and brings the flexibility of online shopping to the high street for the first time. The app provides the customer with a unique barcode and transaction number, which the shop cashier scans to take payment from the customer’s PayPal account. Payments, refunds and discounts are all managed via the app.

Paying with PayPal’s inStore app is secure: the customer enters a PIN to open the app, and no personal or financial information, or money, is stored on her phone. It even works when there is no mobile or Wi-Fi signal. Through the app, the customer can also request a refund in the store for something she’s bought online or on the high street from that PayPal in-store retailer.

PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts or credit cards. With more than 110 million active accounts in 190 markets and 25 currencies around the world, PayPal enables global ecommerce.

PayPal handled $4 billion in mobile payment volume in 2011 – more than 5 times the mobile payment volume it did in 2010. PayPal expects to process over $7 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012.