Venmo announces users can make payments within third-party apps, begins with Gametime and Munchery on iOS
Update Jim Dallke / Chicago Inno : Venmo Now Lets You Pay for Concert Tickets and Food Delivery Harrison Weber / VentureBeat : PayPal spikes 7% as company teases future of Venmo, adds 6.6 million active users
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch confirms the Pay With Venmo feature Quartz sourced the day before: after years as a peer-to-peer split-the-bill utility inside its own app, Venmo is now a checkout button in other companies' iOS apps, starting with ticketing startup Gametime and food delivery service Munchery. The market read it as monetization finally arriving — PayPal stock spiked 7% as the company paired the news with 6.6 million added active users.
It matters because it answers the question hanging over Venmo since PayPal bought it: how to convert a huge, young, low-revenue user base into transaction volume. The related coverage shows the arc this starts — within two years Venmo reaches an estimated 7M MAUs and $18B processed ([[a:918380]]), and by late 2017 over two million US retailers accept it at point of sale.
First-order effects
- Gametime and Munchery get a one-tap payment option aimed at Venmo's mobile-native base, while Venmo's users can for the first time spend their balance outside Venmo's own app on iOS.
Second-order effects
- Square Cash, Zelle, and Apple's P2P push are forced to respond on the same ground — the competition that later drove Venmo and PayPal to add instant bank transfers.
- Other consumer apps (ticketing, delivery, ride-hailing) face pressure to add Venmo at checkout or lose a cohort of buyers who default to it.
Third-order effects
- If in-app acceptance keeps expanding — from these first two partners to the two million US retailers PayPal signed by October 2017, and eventually to distribution deals like Google adding Venmo to Play billing — Venmo completes the pivot from a social P2P app into a general-purpose merchant payment rail competing with cards and wallets.
- That shift puts PayPal in the position of charging merchants for access to a user graph it got free via P2P virality, making checkout placement rather than card issuance the battleground for wallet share.
The trend: Peer-to-peer payment apps are converting viral social usage into merchant checkout rails, with in-app acceptance as the wedge toward full retail and platform distribution.