Venmo is expanding into everyday retail transactions

For PayPal, it’s a strategy to monetize Venmo, whose peer-to-peer payments capabilities aren’t a money maker. Over the past year, PayPal has increased its emphasis on driving profitability for Venmo, in part through retailer transactions. According to PayPal, more than two million merchants support payments from Venmo, and recent additions include Uber, Hulu, Grubhub, Shopify and Williams Sonoma. Twenty-nine percent of Venmo users made a “monetizable transaction” in the fourth quarter of 2018, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said on a fourth-quarter earnings call in January. “Monetizable transactions” are counted by PayPal as revenue from instant transfers, as well as retail partnerships.

Retail brands, meanwhile, want to make online checkouts as easy as possible, and Venmo’s popularity among younger customers make it a shoo-in. Direct-to-consumer home goods and grocery retailer Boxed has had Venmo payments available for nearly a year. It’s partnered with Venmo on paid and organic social media marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Venmo is about being where target customers, particularly younger ones, are, said Seiya Vogt, vp of growth at Boxed, though it’s too early to tell if it has staying power.

“We’re trying to find the best and most seamless way for customers to have a good experience on our site — it depends on what technology they’re using on a day-to-day basis, but more people are using Venmo [on Boxed],” said Vogt. “It seemed like a really good fit; as we see more people using it for daily transactions, there will be more emphasis on Venmo.” Boxed also lets customers pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay.

For bedding brand Brooklinen, Venmo was added because customers asked for it.

“We want to make things as easy as possible for the customers and Venmo was an obvious choice for us,” Brooklinen CEO Rich Fulop said.

For retailers, being able to tie Venmo payments to the platform’s social feed has the potential to grow brand recognition among customers, their friends and family through organic content and paid ads. Neither Brooklinen nor Boxed does this, but they say they’re open to possibilities, depending on how quickly Venmo as a shopping payment method catches on.

“We love any way customers choose to share their experience with Brooklinen, be it word of mouth at dinner or on a social feed,” said Fulop. “[Venmo’s social feed] is not a marketing channel for us at this time, but we are excited to continue to watch how it impacts or improves the customer’s experience.”

David Sica, principal at venture capital firm Nyca Partners, said Venmo is one way retailers can grow their brand positions and loyalty programs, but time will tell if customers use it as readily to buy goods as they do for peer-to-peer payments between friends.

“Merchants need to do something to create loyalty and remain competitive, and their efforts so far have had mixed results,” he said. “There’s this [potential] with Venmo — it has a highly desirable demographic that are users, and you have a social feed to build campaigns around.”