PayPal’s Black Friday Mobile Shopping Up 310 Percent

The latest sales figures from PayPal confirm that consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with making payments from their phones. The payment processor reported Saturday that mobile payments, processed through its platform on Black Friday, jumped by 310 percent, compared to last year.

PayPal’s total payment volume also increased, although not quite as briskly as the mobile portion of it. Overall, the eBay subsidiary processed 27 percent more payments this Black Friday than last year’s, according to the press release.

Here are some key stats of PayPal’s release:

• The holiday shopping season began on Monday, November 15, 2010 (that is PayPal’s estimate).
• Black Friday 2010 resulted in 21 percent more total payment volume compared to Thanksgiving 2010.
• PayPal saw 19 percent more payment volume on Black Friday 2010 compared to an average Friday in 2010.
• PayPal processes 16.5 percent of U.S. eCommerce and 15 percent of global eCommerce.

These figures should certainly be representative of the larger industry trend, as PayPal owns a large chunk of the online payments market. It processes 16.5 percent of all U.S. e-commerce transactions and 15 percent of the global online payment volume.

PayPal has been extremely active on the mobile payments front lately, hoping to take the early lead in the fast-growing nascent market. It launched the X platform last year, which gives outside developers access to PayPal’s payment system. So far PayPal X has attracted 50,000 programmers and 1,000 applications for smart phones, televisions and websites that have generated $1 billion in payments volume for the company.

A month ago, PayPal unveiled a new mobile payment system at its Innovate 2010 developers conference in San Francisco, called Mobile Express Checkout. Mobile Express Checkout enables customers to complete purchases and check out of participating mobile e-commerce websites from their phones.

PayPal’s parent also saw its mobile sales explode at the start of this year’s Holiday shopping season. Here are some of the sales data released by eBay:

• Black Friday sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly doubled this year over Black Friday 2009. Globally, eBay mobile is on track to nearly triple its sales over last year.
• Mobile bidding on eBay increased 30 percent this Black Friday over the previous one.
• Mobile sales are projected to nearly triple this year over 2009, bringing in well over $1.5 billion in sales.
• Since the introduction of eBay’s first mobile application in July 2008, consumers have used it to buy or sell nearly 30 million items around the world.

Earlier this month, eBay launched a new iPhone app that uses RedLaser barcode scanning technology. According to the company, the app enables consumers to comparison-shop across a variety of product categories. Sellers, for their part, will be able to research sales trends, quickly list and manage listings, as well as search completed listings to see what similar items recently sold for.

There is a very good reason for all this activity. Mobile payments are expected to grow to $16 billion this year and then balloon to $214 billion by 2015, up from just $4 billion in 2009, according to a report from the Aite Group, a research and advisory firm. Whoever manages to establish itself early in the game will have the best chance of succeeding in the long run, as PayPal demonstrated a decade ago when it pioneered e-commerce payments.

Image credit: Asiancorrespondent.com.