Paymill announced the launch of their Mobile SDK today, bringing their simplified payments solution (and detailed documentation) to iOS and Android. The goal is to help developers in Europe take advantage of the 50%+ of Europeans who have smartphones, as well as to enable the continued rise of Mobile Commerce.
The online payments space has been quite crowded in recent months – floating to the top and becoming the reference for payments integration is quite a battle, though Paymill has managed to deliver new products at a steady pace. Of course, incumbent PayPal has had a Mobile SDK for quite a while; however, the number of competitors in Online Payments integration widdles down when you begin talking about Mobile App Payments integration.
In order to get a better idea of the mobile payments market landscape today, I sat down with Paymill CEO Mark Henkel to talk about the announcement.
How are Mobile developers integrating payments into their apps today?
PAYMILL‘s Mobile SDK is designed to make easy in-app payments. Today, such payments are mostly processed via the respective app-stores (Apple App Store or Google Play, Amazon etc …) which has advantages (very frictionless integration – users usually have an account) but also major disadvantages (very high transaction fees – normally between 20-30% of the amount). Other opportunities are to redirect a customer to a store’s regular web-site and use its checkout and payment facilities. This is usually inconvenient for the end-customer. PAYMILL closes the gap to make easy in-app payments with apayment provider different from the app-store payment services.