PayPal Expands Global Service

Online payment service PayPal has launched localized sites for Mexico, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and added nine languages to its Web site.

Folks who thought eBay’s online payment service PayPal was already pretty ubiquitous might be in for a little shock: the service is expanding its global reach by rolling out fully localized sites in Mexico, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as adding nine new languages to its primary Web site, including Danish, NOrwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesian.

The additions bring the number of localized PayPal sites to 18, and make PayPal accessible to about 120 million more potential users. Users will be able to send and receive payments using their local currencies, as well as conduct transactions with PayPal’s existing 65 million account holders.

“PayPal is committed to supporting the phenomenal rise of online shopping and electronic payments around the globe,” said Paypal senior of global markets VP Philipp Justus, in a statement. “These new Web sites and languages benefit consumers by making it even easier to buy from merchants around the world and expands our merchants’ access to millions of PayPal account holders, just as we reach the busy holiday season.”

PayPal has also introduced 18 new country-level domains (for Argentina, Chile, Hungary, India, Luxembourg, Malta, The Philippines, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and Venezuela) that display products and services available in those countries.

PayPal remains the leading player in the online payments business, although competitors like Google’s Checkout, Bill Me Later, and Revolution Money are looking for increased business during the end-of-year holidays as consumers look to online deals to safe money during the current economic downturn.