Facebook wants to be your one-stop destination for social networking, content consumption, and e-commerce. Of these, the latter is growing exponentially, especially when it comes to Facebook Messenger’s latest features.

Despite the fact that Facebook’s Messenger Platform is only a year and a half old, it’s come a long way in enabling what app developers and brands can do on it. Back at its inception, Messenger partnered with retailers such as Everlane, Zulily and KLM, who began to use the platform to accept in-app purchases, with the latter enabling passengers to receive their boarding passes, flight updates and more. It also rolled out a payments feature that allowed friends to send each other money and split bills for instance, by connecting their Visa or MasterCard debit cards with the app. At the time, this provided users with an alternative to Snapchat’s own payments feature, the likes of Google Wallet, and Square’s Square Cash. The company then also worked with the likes of PayPal-owned Braintree and Stripe to provide customers’ auto-fill billing details at check out, as well as to develop a Buy button in NewsFeed.

And now, PayPal has announced that it too will be partnering up to enable payments through Facebook Messenger, which currently only supports Visa and MasterCard debit cards transactions. The option will initially be available to US customers, with users able to link their PayPal accounts with Facebook and Messenger when checking out. They will also be able to receive notifications directly in-app, allowing for a frictionless experience. This is great news for the company, who will likely benefit from the 1 billion-strong audience who use the app. A reported 192 million people worldwide currently have active PayPal accounts, and a large proportion of these likely use Messenger, meaning companies who accept PayPal transactions via their mobile sites will be able to reach more customers. These customers will be able to complete their purchases by clicking on the brand’s designated “Buy” button during check out, which will now present the option to pay via PayPal. Customers will also be able to pay via PayPal’s own Messenger bots too- merchants simply have to set up a dialog extension, which will be triggered when the customer goes to check out.

As we looked at in a recent post, Messenger has recently also enabled Shopify integration, benefitting the company’s many brands whose sites are hosted on the platform. And now eBay have also just launched their own Messenger functionality, creating a branded “ShopBot” who will be able to assist buyers and sellers with its AI learning and cloud computing capabilities. Through questions and conversation, the bot will increasingly build up knowledge about the user, enabling it to make product recommendations, search suggestions, and share curated collections of items during future chats. It seems that with several of the world’s most successful and popular global companies now embracing Messenger, the time is clearly right for other businesses to follow suit.

Have you been using Facebook Messenger for in-app purchasing? Do you think having PayPal as a new payment option will make you more likely to use the platform for your purchases? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.