The Future of Money: An Interview with Matt Jones about PayPal Press
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Peachpit: What was the impetus for launching PayPal Press?
Matt Jones: PayPal’s vision is to deliver the future of money to pay and be paid anytime, anywhere, any way. For that to happen, customers need to be engaged completely with all that PayPal offers. PayPal Press offers customers – new and established – information about the many ways PayPal can be part of shopping and buying. For merchants, it offers ways customers can pay online, in stores, or by mobile devices anywhere, with the safety and security online customers have come to expect from PayPal.
Peachpit: What information will PayPal Press deliver that we won’t find elsewhere?
Matt: PayPal Press delivers information from both PayPal insiders and industry experts about how to use our products and services. The PayPal Official Insider Guide series will offer comprehensive how-tos, insider tips, examples, and strategies to merchants and consumers, using the main PayPal website as well as mobile and social media, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Google+. For example, in the first book in the series, The PayPal Official Insider Guide to Growing Your Business: Make Money the Easy Way, author Michael Miller writes about setting up and running businesses. The other two books in the series are Mobile Profits: Make Money Anytime, Anywhere and Selling with Social Media.
Peachpit: Tell us about The PayPal Official Insider Guide to Mobile Profits: Make Money Anytime, Anywhere, coming out in October.
Matt: A 2010 PayPal survey found that small- to medium-size businesses that offered PayPal in addition to traditional credit and debit card payments had up to a 14 percent increase in sales. It follows, then, that adding PayPal Mobile will further enhance this reach.
To appreciate what PayPal Mobile can do for merchants, we’ll show them best practices, trends, stats, tools, tips, techniques, insights, and advice to help make more money, including:
- How mobile commerce works and how merchants can grow unique businesses
- Which mobile selling techniques make sense – and make money
- Why the best time to sell via mobile is right now
- How to track mobile payment and selling trends and innovate for businesses
- Which mobile payment options are right for the way merchants sell
- What it takes to make a successful mobile business, according to PayPal merchant examples
- How to easily integrate and adapt PayPal Mobile Express Checkout, apps, and more
- Why merchants need to regularly assess – and improve – their mobile business
- How to market a new mobile business for fast-changing consumer shopping patterns
- What merchants can do to upgrade their mobile website or app to attract broader, bigger, and more profitable business
We assume that most readers will already have a PayPal merchant account, and will be mainly interested in learning how to add PayPal Mobile payments and related checkout features to grow profits.
Peachpit: The move to mobile transactions is really exciting. Can you give some examples of what’s possible for PayPal users?
Matt: PayPal is at the forefront of helping mobile businesses stay competitive with faster, easier, safer, and more positive customer checkout experiences.
Merchants, developers, and supporters at all levels can improve their mobile checkout and business prospects by working with PayPal Mobile to:
- Maximize payment opportunities in the open mobile marketplace
- Make the most of mobile website and app-building best practices
- Integrate PayPal Mobile Express Checkout and payment software systems
- Master mobile consumer shopping behavior, technology, and payment trends
- Profit with custom, efficient PayPal Mobile payment options for new business
Readers will get exclusive training in the top PayPal Mobile checkout tools to support profitable websites and apps on today’s most popular smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. This expert, timely, easy-to-follow advice – directly from those who design and build PayPal Mobile – is a merchant’s best link to effective mobile payments and business success.
Peachpit: Can you explain how PayPal Mobile helps companies drive business?
Matt: Think of the way shopping and buying has changed with the availability of information over the internet. You can go to a big box store to look for a TV, surf the web on your phone to compare prices, then select and pay for it at some other store that offers a better price and next-day delivery. This presents a challenge for merchants, but also an opportunity. PayPal has already developed ways for merchants to influence consumer choices. For consumers, the benefit is the ability to navigate a variety of shopping, buying and payment processes through a virtual PayPal wallet.
Peachpit: How can The PayPal Official Insider Guide to Growing Your Business: Make Money the Easy Way by Michael Miller help small businesses grow?
Matt: PayPal’s merchant account holders include individual sellers as well as large businesses. They can use various PayPal services to integrate credit card payments, subscription billing, online invoicing, express checkout, international sales, and more.
This book helps both casual sellers and established business owners collaborate with PayPal to:
- Assist customers—from accepting credit cards to allowing bank payments
- Manage money—from getting paid to avoiding fraud
- Apply reports—from assessing inventory to tracking profits
- Maximize growth—from expanding marketing to increasing sales
Peachpit: How can individuals and businesses use PayPal to take advantage of social media?
Matt: Our book will show sellers that social media is the ideal focus and PayPal is the best payment-processing tool to grow profits. We’ll present key social-media sales strategies, tactics, action plans, and success stories to help sellers choose the right solutions with PayPal.
Casual sellers and established small- to medium-size business owners will learn to use social media to build better customer relationships and more profits online.
Peachpit: How can nonprofits or individuals use PayPal to raise money for causes or charities?
Matt: Our book, The PayPal Official Guide to Fund-raising: Make Money for Your Cause, will discuss creative and effective nonprofit management with PayPal fund-raising and processing tools.
It will feature:
- Plans detailing the 10 crucial steps in the set-up, monitoring, and progress of a viable nonprofit organization
- Fact sheets, cases, peer testimonies, donor tips, “must-do” lists, plus templates, forms, and PayPal tools for nonprofit fund-raising success
- Special sections highlighting the latest and most creative online fund-raising efforts, including running eBay auctions and obtaining donations via unique PayPal apps
Readers in all areas of nonprofit organization engagement can refer to our book often—as a primer and a program—for more creative management and more prosperous services with PayPal’s help.
Peachpit: What are some future directions PayPal is looking toward and how does PayPal Press dovetail with these efforts?
Matt: PayPal is creating mechanisms for a new world of money in which shopping, buying, and paying can happen anytime, anywhere, any way. The traditional steps involved in shopping and buying no longer apply: intent to purchase, research, shop, decide, buy/purchase. Now you might pay even before you had an intention (Groupon, for example), or research, compare prices, and buy from the aisles of a big box store while purchasing and paying in another.
It becomes increasingly important that merchants and consumers alike understand this new world and learn very quickly to navigate it. PayPal Press offers access to authors who can help to chart a path to success in personal finance and commercial and nonprofit ventures of all sizes.