PayPal lets you buy inside Glance's AI shopping app without leaving

PayPal has teamed up with Glance, an AI shopping app, so people in the United States can pay for items inside the app without being sent to another website. Glance comes preinstalled on about 60 million phones and TVs, including devices from Samsung and Motorola. PayPal is the only partner offering this in-app checkout.

What changed

Until now, shopping apps mostly helped you find things and then pushed you to a store's site to pay. Glance is changing that. You can discover a product, try it on virtually and complete the purchase in one place. Glance is backed by InMobi. PayPal calls this agentic commerce, which means AI tools helping handle the buying steps.

How it works

You can upload a photo and the app builds an AI avatar of you. You can then see how clothes might look on it. You can also share the result with friends before you buy.

For stores, the link keeps product details current in real time, so they can show what is in stock and what it costs. PayPal says merchants keep control of their customer relationships. Retailers can extend their storefronts into Glance through a single connection to several AI shopping experiences.

Why companies want this

Glance's chief operating officer, Mansi Jain, said the PayPal feature turns Glance from a place to browse into a full shopping destination. PayPal's Mike Edmonds said the lines between discovering, shopping and buying are disappearing. The move follows PayPal's September work with Meta's personal AI agent, Muse.

What to do

Fewer steps make buying faster. They can also make spending easier to do without thinking. If you use Glance, treat each payment screen as a real checkout.

• Check the total before you confirm.
• Look at which store you are actually buying from.
• Pause before buying something a friend only saw in a try-on.

What happens next

The material does not say when every user will see the feature, which stores are included or what any fees might be. Those details are not known yet.

PayPal reports quarterly earnings on October 27. Analysts expect earnings of $1.31 per share, compared with $1.34 a year earlier, and revenue of $8.71 billion, up from $8.42 billion. Shares were up 0.45% at $57.42 when the original report was published. Analysts rate the stock a Hold, with an average price target of $58.35.