I tend to use the same online shops over and over again for convenience. I don't like having to enter my shipping, billing and credit card information multiple times, and using the same shops means I have fewer passwords to remember. Additionally, there's peace of mind knowing my credit card info isn't being scattered across multiple merchants. The downside of this behavior is pretty obvious: I rarely get the lowest price on things and I often have to wait longer to receive an item when my go-to merchant is out of stock.

For these reasons, today I'm personally very happy to announce that we have formed a partnership with PayPal, the most widely accepted checkout service on the web. We are integrating PayPal into Yahoo! Search, enabling people to checkout faster and with greater security when they make online purchases. Beginning today, when you search for a product on Yahoo! Search you will see little blue shopping cart icons next to some of our merchant listings. Those shopping carts identify merchants that accept PayPal:

The ability to quickly locate PayPal merchants will save you some time because the PayPal checkout system remembers all of your personal information, providing you (and me) with the convenience of a single username and password, as well as a consolidated look at your transaction history so you can view all of your purchases and track each items' shipping progress.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog has a great post up today about what this partnership means for advertisers and web merchants. We hope the PayPal integration makes your shopping experience faster, safer and more convenient on Yahoo! Search.

Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search