Brief:

• EBay will add Google Pay to its list of payment options to give buyers and sellers another way to conduct transactions on the digital marketplace. EBay will let Google Pay users complete purchases through its app, mobile website and desktop site from sellers that participate in managed payments, per an announcement.
• Google Pay will be available to Android users in its marketplace starting in early April, less than a year after eBay added Apple Pay to its marketplace to appeal to iPhone and iPad users. Customers who have the Google Pay digital wallet also can complete purchases on any desktop, regardless of operating system or device.
• Google Pay and Apple Pay are only accessible when buying from sellers that are enrolled in eBay's managed payments experience introduced last year. At that time, eBay announced plans to intermediate end-to-end payments on its marketplace to simplify transactions while reducing its dependence on PayPal, which was spun out from eBay in 2015. EBay plans to manage most payments on its platform by 2021.

Insight:

EBay’s addition of mobile payment platforms such as Google Pay and Apple Pay likely will appeal to the growing number of consumers who are becoming more comfortable with mobile payment platforms. Tech-savvy millennials and Generation Z have led the way in adopting digital wallets in the United States, which has a well-established infrastructure to handle credit and debit card transactions. EBay can broaden its appeal to those mobile customers who want to manage their payments with a single digital wallet that replaces plastic payment cards.

The addition of Google Pay to eBay may help the search giant's payment service find greater adoption. Last year, the portion of online merchants that accept Apple Pay and Google Pay declined, according to a Q1 survey from fraud detection platform Kount. Online merchant support for Apple Pay dropped to 35% this year from 48% in 2017, while Google Pay (previously called Android Pay) fell to 25% from 38%. As for consumer adoption, about 7% of U.S. adults said they had used Android Pay to make a payment at any time, compared with 24% for Walmart Pay, 13% for Apple Pay and 5% for Samsung pay, according to a survey cited by Pymnts.com.

The most popular payment apps on mobile devices in the United States are for person-to-person (P2P) transactions, according to researcher eMarketer. The researcher estimated that P2P adoption of apps like Venmo will grow to 96 million users, or 40% of all mobile phone users, in 2019 from 82.5 million in 2018. The most common smartphone activity while shopping is comparing prices (36%). Thirty percent of mobile users gather product information and read product reviews, while only 26% transact on a mobile device and 17% make in-store payments, per a separate survey from eMarketer.