You Can Now Send and Receive Money Through URLs with PayPal
Paying people through PayPal just got a bit easier. The company rolled out another person-to person-payments service Tuesday: PayPal.Me, a barebones payments app that uses a URL to allow people to collect and send money to people they know.
Rather than a standalone app like the PayPal-owned Venmo, PayPal.Me is essentially an extension of PayPal’s existing request money feature. Those who opt in to the feature set up a personalized URL that is linked to their PayPal account. Once set up, anyone who views the link is able to send money through their own PayPal account.
The process of sending and receiving payments are more or less the same as any other PayPal transaction. Users must log in for each transaction and transactions are limited to $10,000 for those that have verified their accounts.
Though its core functionality is nearly identical to Venmo, Meron Colbeci, PayPal’s senior director of global consumer product, says PayPal.Me stands out from PayPal’s other personal payments offerings because of its potential appeal to groups of people, and the minimal setup effort involved.
“This is a very very good use case for group collections,” Colbeci told Mashable. “One of the key advantages here is that you’ve got the PayPal account, which really funds these transactions and by just using your username and password you can easily go through the checkout and you don’t have to enter all of your debit or credit card information.”
Group payments aside, PayPal has made it clear it wants to own as many payments on as many platforms as it can. Making person to person payments even a little easier, especially for non-millennials who may not use the emoji-filled Venmo, could stand to help PayPal get a bit closer to that goal.
PayPal.Me is available now in the United States as well as Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, Russia, Turkey, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria.