A whole lot of people use Fandango, the online movie ticket purchasing service, from their mobile devices. Already the app was highly convenient, allowing you to purchase your tickets from anywhere you could establish a 3G Internet connection just by using a credit card number. Then you can have tickets emailed to you to print out, and at some theaters, you can even just scan a barcode on your device and you’re on your way.
Apparently, though, Fandango is taking steps to make the service even more convenient by adding support for eBay’s PayPal service to the mobile apps as well. That will open up even more options for payments, as currently Fandango supports either storing your credit card information on your mobile device or storing it in an online Fandango account that you can link to your app. Both are secure, but neither carries quite as much piece of mind as PayPal for some users.
Fandango has seen about 20 million app downloads across Apple’s iOS platform, Google’s Android, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Fierce Mobile Content reports, and the company says that the number of tickets it sold on mobile devices leapt by 73 percent in 2011 as compared to 2010. Fandango’s online service accounted for $32 million of the total ticket sales for this summer’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (19 percent of its total gross), and of that $32 million, about 20 percent – $6.5 million – came through Fandango’s mobile apps. That’s a whole lot of tickets being sold through apps.
With PayPal added in, purchasing tickets on Fandango’s apps will be even easier, which could very well have an effect on how many users are making those purchases. PayPal accounted for $3.5 billion in payments during 2011, suggesting just how widespread the service is. There are a lot of people with PayPal accounts out there, and the service does a pretty good job of remaining (mostly) secure.
More and more, users are becoming more comfortable with using mobile devices to make purchases. A survey taken in November suggested that 70 percent of mobile users polled said they had already or planned to buy holiday gifts using their mobile devices, and that they’d be spending more on mobile transactions than they did in 2010.
So building support for a mobile payment structure for Fandango’s mobile service is a no-brainer. According to Fandango’s press release, PayPal support should be available to users now – just in time for holiday movie-goers to enjoy it.
