PayPal has just announced a brand new platform, named PayPal.Me, which will help you share your own customised URL with your peers for sending/receiving online payments.
So how does it work ? Well, on a personal note, it is insanely simple !
All you gotta do, is login to paypal.me and create your own personalised URL. (Say paypal.me/deep) Once you’ve set up your own page, your friends or anyone who wishes to pay you via PayPal can simply go on to your personalised URL, log in and pay. As simple as that. A prerogative though, is the person paying must have a PayPal account.
PayPal says, that the feature has been introduced because of a study, which revealed how most people tend to loose a lot of money because their friends or family forget to pay them little bits of currency here and there.
PayPal senior director of global consumer product management, Meron Colbeci said,
About 50 percent of Americans say they have small debt from friends and family that is owed to them
And just to let you know certain numbers, PayPal conducted a study, which revealed that US citizens owned their peers and family a massive $51 Billion in peer-to-peer debt. ! The idea behind PayPal.me is that people will be more likely to pay you back if, when you’re reminding them to pay up, which can be done with a special link which the personalised offers.
While the feature is obviously pretty impressive and handy, PayPal might be evading into certain startup’s territories with this. In the US for example, a Square product was launched earlier this year called Cashtags. The feature is essentially a hashtag for getting cash sent directly to you through Square’s Cash.me site. In India too, there are a few apps which let you keep track of payments you might have missed from your friends and family.
However, PayPal, with its massive cash backing and upsurge post its separation from eBay, obviously has an upper hand over all other smaller services. And PayPal’s sheer customer size (169 million customers in 190 countries) is enough to make its PayPal.Me service more successful as compared to others.
The service though, hasn’t been rolled out globally. Starting today, users in 18 countries will have access to PayPal.me, and sadly, India is not a part of that list. You can expect India to be added as more locations are rolled out.
