A Redesigned, Slicker PayPal Is Coming Tomorrow; Some Seeing New Look Today
PayPal, the eBay-owned online payments service that is making significant inroads into mobile, is giving its website an overhaul to make it easier for its 100 million+ users to pay and get paid, find help …
Context & Ripple Effects
The redesign lands mid-way through a busy year for eBay's payments unit: in March PayPal previewed a digital wallet with personalized deals and flexible payments, then shipped PayPal Here, the card-reading dongle that put it head-to-head with Square, Intuit and Verifone in small-business mobile payments. The company had already reworked its iPhone app back in 2010, so tomorrow's site overhaul extends that interface refresh from phone to desktop.
The pickup pattern shows the story travelled widely — CNET and VentureBeat both ran it on the day — which fits its framing as a consumer-facing milestone for a service claiming more than 100 million users rather than a niche product note.
First-order effects
- PayPal's 100 million+ users get a new web experience starting today for some and tomorrow for the rest, changing how they pay, get paid, and reach support on the site.
- eBay gains a consistent face for a brand it has been pushing hard into mobile all year, tying the desktop property to the wallet and PayPal Here launches of March 2012.
Second-order effects
- Square and the other dongle rivals now compete against a PayPal whose merchant pitch spans dongle, mobile app, and a refreshed web console — consolidation of the small-business relationship across surfaces becomes the differentiator.
- Merchants who built workflows around the old PayPal interface absorb retraining and support costs, a familiar tax whenever a payments provider changes its primary UI.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, payment providers converge on one design language across web, app, and point-of-sale hardware, making interface cohesion — not transaction fees alone — a competitive axis in consumer payments.
The trend: Legacy online-payments platforms are unifying their web and mobile experiences as they fight newer entrants like Square for the small-business checkout relationship.