Bill Zielke, senior director of merchant services for PayPal, has an interesting post over on the PayPal blog talking about mobile payments – specifically PayPal Mobile Express Checkout – a mobile version of PayPal’s Express Checkout service that allows merchants to offer the PayPal experience to their on-the-go customers.

We are in the early stages with Mobile Express Checkout, and it’s being initially rolled out on the iPhone and Android 2.0 (and higher) devices by a few innovative retailers, including Nike and Buy.com, over the next few weeks. Jeff Wisot, vice president of marketing at Buy.com shared a few words about Mobile Express Checkout recently saying, “We’re seeing a huge opportunity in mobile commerce right now. PayPal’s Mobile Express Checkout will allow us to enhance the convenient shopping experience for on-the-go customers.”

Mobile Express Checkout will be available for the rest of our merchants later this summer. Here are just a few of the features it will include:

* One-stop payment service that allows merchants to sell to millions of mobile shoppers
* Quick deployment and integration to get merchants in the mobile game fast
* A seamless customer experience which is especially important with smaller screens and keyboards – no cumbersome data entry, just a few clicks and customers are done
* Strong fraud detection

Check out the full blog post here and keep an eye out for developments over the coming months.

Cheers!
RBH

eBay Desktop
According to Alan, the majority of initial users of the Desktop application are those folks that are ahead of the technology curve, willing to try new things. He also pointed out that the interaction on Desktop vs. eBay.com is philosophically different with the former being more personal and the latter being more open and social. In a follow-up discussion, Alan indicated that the in-person usability study went quite well last week so I’d like to get more info on that too.

We both agreed that the seller functionality is needed on the Desktop application to propel it into more of a mainstream status and it appears that this functionality is written into the product timeline (no hints on dates here though I’m afraid). On the flip-side, one of my personal favorite features of eBay Desktop is “Search Feeds” or simply “Feeds”. This feature allows you to access your favorite searches or create new ones, and view them as “feeds” just as you would in an RSS reader. You can also see if an item is new and delete items you’re not interested in. As the Desktop application gains more traction this feature will need to be addressed on ebay.com too because users will come to expect it.

eBay iPhone Application
I had written about the eBay iPhone application back at the beginning of June and now that it’s live, I’d like to have a sit down with Ken Sun and Alan about the future plans of the app (including international plans). I did ask Alan what Steve Jobs thought of the application when Ken first demoed it to him in his office and his first impression was that he called it a real “meat and potatoes application” – something that actually brings value to the iPhone customer and not just a flashy feature. I guess when the app was first featured on the homepage it received 3 times the normal number of click-thrus and enjoyed the highest percentage of click-thrus for that slot.

On working at eBay
Alan has been with eBay for 4 and a half years now and we talked about the changes he has seen over the past few years and what his observations are overall. Sure, we talked about all the great things about working here at eBay and why we come to work every day but I wanted to talk about ways in which we could do better as a company.

He stressed that he feels communication has been flawed at times and that we need to do a better job communicating directly with all of our constituencies. Something we’ve talked a lot about here on Ink. He also talked about the shift in priorities. He contends that from 1999 to 2004, the company’s biggest priority was keeping up with the growth of the site and most decisions were made with scalability in mind. As a result, site usability ultimately suffered somewhat. Since that time, all new feature and product enhancements have been focused squarely on the user experience. Right now, we’re focusing on the buyer experience because this was a more neglected area during the time of great scalability… having said that, he also indicated that he didn’t feel like it is a buyer vs. seller approach (a lot of the time eBay users are both) but that every decision made is targeted at the overall user experience.

All in all, a very interesting discussion and one that I want to continue with him in the near future. Looping Ken Sun in too so we can chat more about the iPhone App.

Cheers,
RBH