The full-scale rollout is being handled via Nihon PayPal KK, the joint venture company established last year by PayPal and SoftBank to market and distribute PayPal Here throughout Japan.
“We’ve worked hard to be the first to make this type of simple, secure mobile payment solution widely available in Japan,” said Rohan Mahadevan, vice president, Asia, PayPal Pte Ltd., on the PayPal blog. “We’ve listened closely to the needs of the local business community to make PayPal Here more useful for them… We truly believe that PayPal Here is a game-changer for small businesses.”
PayPal Here, the world’s first global mobile payment solution, has already been launched in the US, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, and a chip-and-pin version was just announced for the U.K. market at Mobile World Congress.
PayPal Here’s expansion in the key Japanese market is being accompanied by several new related services and products. The free Japanese version of the PayPal Here merchant app for Android is now available, in addition to iOS. Merchants will have access to email and SMS receipts, while Bluetooth-enabled compact mobile printers can print out credit card transaction receipts even at outdoor events.
Thousands of Japanese small businesses and entrepreneurs, including retail shops, F&B outlets and service providers, have been using PayPal Here since it went on sale in SoftBank Mobile stores last September.
“Originally, we have considered other credit card payment options, but they had high initial costs, time-consuming registration process, and long cash collection period of once or twice a month,” said Thomas Bertrand, owner of Bento&Co, which provides stylish bento boxes and kitchen utilities in a physical shop in Kyoto. “So we chose to use PayPal Here instead, and three weeks after we started we saw that payments via PayPal Here have already grown 10%.”
Even more importantly, Bertrand noted, was the fact that “customers would purchase additional products because they can pay by credit cards.”
Japanese readers can learn more about PayPal Here on the SoftBank site.