Offering a PayPal option on a website can increase lifted average order value and reduce cart abandonment, writes Peter Borden at Monetate.com. Borden helped a client experiment with the PayPal button to see if it increased traffic. "Adding this simple reassurance to product detail pages not only lifted average order value by 1.03%, but it also reduced cart abandonment by 1.21%." Not a huge lift, he acknowledged, "but not shabby either."

One reason for the lift is the trust factor that PayPal has built up over the decade. Now, that the service provider is pushing its brand into the brick-and-mortar world, that trust factor, to say nothing of its name recognition will only increase—and presumably deliver related benefits to websites offering the PayPal option as well.

The Home Depot Alliance

PayPal plans to offer its payment option in some 2,000 Home Depot stores this Spring. Customers are able to pay by just entering their mobile number and PIN or swiping a PayPal credit card at checkout.

Mobile Payments As a Breakthrough Category

This is hardly the only endeavor PayPal is promoting. The company has a range of payment solutions for retailers that it is currently debuting, according to Mobile Payments Today.

Little wonder that mobile payments and mobile commerce have been ranked a top area of development, according to a Chetan Sharma survey. Rounding out the top 5 projected breakthrough categories are mobile health, mobile enterprise, and near field communication (NFC), each of which were cited by roughly one-quarter of respondents. Location-based services (LBS) and mobile advertising were the least-cited categories, the latter’s decline from last year’s third place attributed to its increasingly mainstream nature.