Venmo announces online shopping payment feature

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Bust out those jeans and high heel emojis - Venmo is about to change your online shopping game.

On Tuesday, PayPal-owned Venmo announced that its users will soon be able to use Venmo to make merchant payments online. The move marks a shift for the app from a primarily peer-to-peer service to a more full-service payment platform. 

It is also the next step toward monetizing Venmo, following the company"s July 2016 rollout of in-app purchases. With each payment made online using Venmo, PayPal will charge the merchant a fee. PayPal"s standard rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

"We"re dramatically expanding the number of places you can use Venmo to pay by leveraging the unrivaled scale of the PayPal merchant network," PayPal COO Bill Ready said. 

Users will soon receive a notification in the app inviting them to turn on the new purchases feature. All merchants who already accept PayPal will be able to enable the option via PayPal this week.

The Venmo shopping feature will work almost exactly like PayPal. To use Venmo to pay for that latest late night shoe binge, users click the PayPal button in their shopping carts. They then select "Pay with Venmo," and voila, they can use whatever cards or accounts they already have linked to the app to check out.

One of the best things about Venmo is its social feed, because creeping on who"s paying who for sushi is the best way to see who"s hanging out without you. But the social feed will be crucial for merchant payments, too: users will have the ability to share their shopping purchases in the same feed as those friend payments. Venmo said that it doesn"t "have ambitions to be an ad platform."

As with its peer-to-peer service, Venmo users will be able to split, charge, and pay these online purchases with friends in the app. Your Venmo payment to an online store will show up in your personal feed. From there you can add those crucial emoji comments, and charge and tag whoever owes you money.

Further integrating Venmo into the lives of its young shoppers could be critical for Venmo"s continued growth as the mobile payment market only gets more competitive. And hey, we could probably all use a little retail therapy, anyway.

UPDATED Oct. 17, 2017 at 12:30 p.m. PT: This post has been updated with Paypal COO Bill Ready"s correct title. 

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