UPDATED 16:30 EDT / MAY 20 2019

APPS

Tapping the megamall in your pocket: PayPal revamps mobile shopping

It was heralded as a shopping revolution. No more dragging the kids around on weekly errands and standing in long lines. Forget driving from place to place, parking and walking into store after store after store. Searching for that elusive item is no longer a day-long trek. Just pull out that smartphone; click, and wait for the doorbell to ring.

Except … we don’t. Turns out the Achilles’ heel of e-commerce is the short attention span. We browse when we’re bored, idle window shopping rather than focused product purchase. So, while there’s no shortage of online interaction, making the conversion from “Cool, I want that” to “I just bought that” is a sticking point in the e-commerce flow.

“One of the things we talk a lot about is removing that friction,” said Jenny Cheng (pictured), vice president of global professional services at PayPal Holdings Inc. “When we have you, how can we quickly get you past that point of checkout?”

Cheng spoke with Jeff Frick and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Imagine event in Las Vegas. They discussed how the mobile marketing community is evolving e-commerce platforms and simplifying the shopping experience to increase revenue (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, the CUBE spotlights Jenny Cheng in its Women in Tech feature.

Cheng’s personal cloud commerce journey

“Product” and “technology” are two words that feature heavily in Cheng’s resume. She joined the Salesforce.com Inc. technology and products program when the company was just three years old. That’s before its online application marketplace AppExchange went live, and even before the first Dreamforce conference.

Cheng was instrumental in product development as Salesforce grew from a software as a service start-up to a global cloud technology platform. “There was a sense of urgency in the early days,” she told Forbes magazine in a recent article celebrating Salesforce’s 20th anniversary. “An urgency to get every new feature and release right and out to customers as soon as possible. An urgency to get new products into the hands of customers quickly, and always a focus on both short- and long-term customer success.”

That sense of urgency may have been what propelled her to top of the Salesforce ladder — and what motivated her to co-found her own startup before taking on the responsibility of leading PayPal’s Global Professional Services team. Her SaaS, business-to-business, and cloud expertise is put to good use at PayPal, where she remains at the forefront of the rapid evolution of the shopping experience.

“It’s a fascinating journey to watch [the world] move from point-of-sale, move from brick and mortar, to online and engaged,” Cheng said.

In her keynote address from the Imagine 2019 stage, Cheng described the world as undergoing a “fourth industrial revolution” as cloud, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and other advanced technologies combine to catalyze rapid and revolutionary change. The future of commerce is “immediate, pervasive and increasingly mobile,” she said, forecasting changes that “we cannot even imagine yet.”

One thing is certain: The change centers around making it simpler to spend, and to access, our digital funds.

Making it easy to buy goods, access funds

Just as we have our favorite brick-and-mortar hang-outs, consumers have preferred online locations to shop and interact. But constantly logging in and signing up to new sites, or entering basic information such as shipping address and payment method over and over, gets old really fast. Making the experience seamless across these sites benefits both consumers and merchants by making transactions easier, which in turn increases revenue.

“Our customers want [PayPal] there at that point of engagement,” Cheng said. Doing just that is PayPal’s Smart Payment Buttons, which offers merchants a way to embed a secure, easy and consistent check-out on any website.

As well as a successful high-tech executive, Cheng is the mother of two girls. This gives her a personal perspective on the benefits of technological advances in e-commerce. “As a working parent, I’m always looking for convenience,” she said.

One tangible result: ordering groceries online frees up time to spend with her family.

Twenty-one million merchants offer PayPal as a payment option, and over 300 million consumers use PayPal for purchases, according to Cheng. From its start as a peer-to-peer exchange network, the company has grown into a financial powerhouse, holding close to $23 million in funds receivable and customer accounts” as of March 31 2019, according to the company’s investor report.

But what good is having money online if you can’t spend it? “We continuously see this divide between the digital and the physical realms of accessing money,” Cheng stated.

Democratizing financial services is part of PayPal’s core mission statement. “We’re very fortunate, being in high tech … where we’re not intimidated, necessarily, by all this new technology,” she added.

Removing the bank from the financial equation is one way to give customers fast and easy access to cash. “It’s easier to get to a lot of Walmart stores in the U.S. than it is to [a lot of] banks,” Cheng stated. Knowing that “one plus one is greater than two,” PayPal and Walmart have partnered to provide a new way of accessing digital funds.

While standing in line at a Walmart check-out counter, PayPal account holders can generate a unique barcode on their mobile device. The cashier then scans it, the amount is deducted from the user’s PayPal account, and the cashier hands over the cash. Describing it as working in the same way a debit card allows you to get cash back from a traditional bank account, Cheng said, “it’s super convenient, an easy way to get to your money.”

Making it convenient and easy is the concept that drives Cheng both at work and at home. It’s one that resonates in today’s fast-paced lifestyle: “Ultimately, what we’re kind of all looking for is: ‘How do you make it convenient and easy for me to do what I want to do and do what I have to do?’” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Imagine 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Imagine 2019. Neither Adobe Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU