Digital Trends

PayPal Secure Card software is supposed to recognize when users land on ecommerce sites and automatically fill out payment info securely - even if the site doesn't handle PayPal.

Online payment service PayPal is preparing to launch PayPal Secure Card, a software utility that's designed to help users fill out payment info on e-commerce sites in a secure way. PayPal Secure Card generates a unique MasterCard number every time a PayPal user uses the software on an ecommerce site—and because it's a MasterCard number, the software even lets PayPal users conduct transactions on sites that don't accept PayPal.

Secure Card has been in wide testing over the last year, with an estimated 3 million PayPal users checking out the system. PayPal Secure Card will be available as a browser plug-in beginning November 20 to U.S.based PayPal users; support for international markets should start following in the next few months.

To use the software, PayPal customers click a PayPal icon on their browser toolbar; an onscreen representation of a credit card appears in a window, with a new transaction-specific MasterCard number, expiration date, and CVV. Payments made using this MasterCard number are made directly from the user's PayPal account. No payment or transaction information is stored locally on the users' computer. Form-filling capability was limited to Internet Explorer in the beta; Firefox users in the beta have reported mixes results with the browser plug-in, and only a handful of features are supported for Apple's Safari Web browser.

Overall, the move could be a winner for PayPal, since it lets PayPal's active U.S. account holders use their PayPal balances at merchants who don't directly support PayPal, which not only increases the number of transactions the service handles, but makes the service more appealing to consumers. PayPal recently reported it has nearly 38 million active account holders, with a 164 million total accounts worldwide.