PayPal Launches Digital Gift Store with Apple as First Partner

PayPal has launched a new online service called PayPal Digital Gifts, which aims to be a go-to portal for buying gift cards and other digital gifts that you can email to others, and since it’s through PayPal, the company is making it really easy to buy digital gifts using your PayPal account.

The storefront isn’t much yet, but it does have one significant partner, and that’s Apple. By visiting PayPal Digital Gifts, you’ll see a small selection of iTunes gift cards that you can buy for yourself or for other people, and it comes in $15, $25, $50 and $100 denominations. However, the $15 and $25 options appear to be sold out at the moment.

PayPal does admit that the service isn’t all the much to look at yet, but it promises to launch more partners in the near future, although we’re a little baffled as to why the service launched with only one partner, but we supposed iTunes gift cards are a big enough industry itself, that PayPal can bring in a healthy amount of money just from selling them alone.

This new initiative goes along great with other recent news that PayPal provided last week, which adds support for prepaid gift cards to PayPal’s digital wallet service, making it easy to spend that money without having to go to a physical store in order to spend it. We’re not sure exactly if this new feature and PayPal Digital Gifts will have a close bond, but we wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of connection there.

Unfortunately, we’re not sure what other kinds of gifts that this storefront will offer in the future, but we think it’ll take a bit of convincing for shoppers to use PayPal’s gift store rather than get a gift card from the source. Plus, seeing how many online shoppers aren’t too fond of PayPal to begin with, thanks to its shady policies, the gift store may not catch much steam like PayPal hopes. However, we’ll have to wait and see how it grows over time once the company adds more partners to the list.