PayPal releases Mobile Express Checkout for on-the-go consumers

PayPal, a service for sending and receiving money, today announced that it has brought its Express Checkout service to smartphones. Dubbed Mobile Express Checkout, the service will allow on-the-go customers to make mobile purchases quickly and safely.

According to Juniper Research, mobile payments are expected to reach $200 billion by 2012. And with more and more people using smartphones, PayPal believes the market is ripe. Senior director of merchant service Bill Zielke noted in a recent blog post, “We expect to close out 2010 with more than half a billion dollars in mobile payment volume and more than five million members regularly using PayPal from their mobile devices.”

Similar to its Express Checkout, PayPal’s Mobile Express Checkout will allow customers to save time by not having to reenter information on billing, shipping or payment types. Rather, the information is saved and with just a few clicks, the on-the-go consumer can be done. The service allows merchants to engage with mobile consumers, quickly get up and running and continue to have the strong fraud monitoring also found online.

The company claims 84 million active accounts in 190 markets around the world, while a ticker on the main website says it has north of 221 million accounts. That implies that only about 38 percent of people who’ve signed up with PayPal are actively using the service — perhaps a number it could boost by making the service easier to use on mobile.

PayPal will begin to roll out the service over the next few weeks, starting with iPhone and Android devices as well as a few retailers such as Nike and Buy.com.