PayPal has been aggressively expanding beyond its traditional e-commerce roots over the last year as the divide between the online and offline worlds merge. Its new PayPal Here offering, turning mobile phones into card readers, has proved a big hit with small merchants but the company also wants to make its mark with larger retailers.

Earlier this year Home Depot agreed to roll out the firm's in-store payment system nationwide following a six-week trial and PayPal aims to strike similar deals by working with VeriFone, which claims 80% of the 200 largest retailers in the US and over one million points of sale.

Initially VeriFone will layer PayPal's "digital wallet" interfaces and user experience at select merchant locations in the US using the MX Solutions products. This means shoppers will be able to use PayPal Access cards to pay for in-store purchases, or enter a mobile phone number and PIN into the terminal.



Long-term, VeriFone will enable PayPal acceptance natively as part of new packages offered to its retail customer base. The system is also future-proofed so that adding new options, such as NFC, will be easy to implement when they become available.

Seperately, Paypal has secured an agreement with Equinox - formerly known as Hypercom - to encode provision for PayPal payments into the POS supplier's next-generation PCI 3.x Certified L5300 and L5200 consumer-facing payment terminals. Equinox terminals ae curently used by the three of the nation's top ten retailes to process payments at the check-out.

PayPal struck a similar deal with Ingenico in January of this year.

Between them, the three terminal manufacturers operate an installed base of about 40 million terminals worldwide.