PayPal will be launching a convenient way for its 164 million users to make payments at websites that do not accept Paypal directly. According to Reuters

The new software utility, called the PayPal Secure Card, recognizes when a user lands on an e-commerce checkout page and automatically helps the user fill out the payment form in a secure way that also offers stepped-up fraud protections.

In Google’s dominance era where virtually all companies are competing with Google, the introduction of PayPal Secure Card is said to be a move to provide answers to Google’s Checkout service.

So how it works? (taken from Reuters)

When a PayPal customer wants to pay for something on a site that doesn’t normally accept PayPal payments, users click a downloaded PayPal button on their browsers to generate a unique, single-instance Secure Card transaction number.

By residing on the PayPal user’s computer, Secure Card can detect when users visit e-commerce sites. The software then automatically fills in their stored financial information, requiring just a few more clicks to authorize a transaction.

PayPal stores no details on the local computer for security reasons. Instead, it logs Secure Card activity in the user’s account on central computers for safety and record-keeping.

My praise to Paypal for taking this initiative to make life more easier and convenient for its users and cleverly launching it at the right time when Holiday Shopping Season has just begun!