Live From PayPal, It’s Pay With Venmo (For Everyone)

Venmo, the PayPal-owned company that started out enabling payments person to person, moved several new features out of beta on Tuesday (July 26), opening them up to all Venmo users.

Venmo said in a blog post that the new feature, which it had been testing for about six months, will enable its customers to conduct transactions and share the bill on the apps of participating stores. The service will be available to all of its users starting today (July 27) and named 10 retailers as partners. They are: Boxed, a bulk ordering website; Delivery.com, a food delivery service; Dolly, a moving app; Gametime, a mobile ticketing app; Hop Market, a mobile marketplace; Munchery, a food delivery app; Parking Panda, a parking reservation app; Poshmark, a fashion marketplace; Priv, a beauty and wellness app; Urgentli, a rental marketplace; and Wish, a shopping app.

The company is aiming to add more retailers going forward.

“So long, beta. Earlier in 2016, we announced that a limited number of Venmo users would get to experience the familiar delight and ease of paying with Venmo within their favorite merchant apps,” said Venmo on its blog. “Today, we are thrilled to announce that all of our Venmo users will be able to make purchases with Venmo beginning tomorrow.”

In order for users to pay via a participating app they have to choose Venmo at checkout instead of putting their information in manually. In order to split a bill the user has to go the company’s app to enable it.

Venmo is an up and coming payment company owned by PayPal that’s garnering excitement because it enables customers to do things like share payments. But it has not been all good news for the company. At the end of April PayPal confirmed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Venmo.

“On March 28, 2016, we received a civil investigative demand (CID) from the Federal Trade Commission as part of its investigation to determine whether we, through our Venmo service, have been or are engaged in deceptive or unfair practices in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act,” the filing read. “The CID requests the production of documents and answers to written questions related to our Venmo service. We are cooperating with the FTC in connection with the CID.”