• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 16, 2013

This is starting to get ridiculous. The number of companies wanting to grab a piece of the mobile payments pie is approaching laughable. So when news hit yesterday, courtesy of AllThingsD, that Facebook was testing a mobile payment product, I thought -- oh, why the hell not.

According to AllThingsD, as well as a response from Facebook itself, this is yet another scheme to make mobile payments more frictionless by letting online shoppers pay for stuff on their phones about as easily as they now use Facebook Connect to log in elsewhere. The system would allow those who already have payment information stored with Facebook to make a payment on a partner app. JackThreads will be one of the merchants testing the platform, and it is indicative of the online focus of the model for now.

Facebook does not seem to be making PayPal-like claims about becoming a brick-and-mortar payment solution. It will likely compete with PayPal in the e-commerce/m-commerce space but there is no indication here that it wants to be a proximity payment solution.

Facebook’s approach is to be payment-process-agnostic in that it allows apps to use their own processors like credit cards and banks, but let Facebook serve as the universal front end that connects with that entity. “The test does not involve moving the payment processes away from an app’s current provider,” Facebook told AllThingsD later.   

Of course, there is the open question whether consumers want their social network acting as a payment go-between. They already do this, of course, for the internal economy of Facebook, credit-buying, gifting, in-app purchases, etc. But migrating the brand into other mobile apps to become a buy button is another matter. It isn’t as if Zuckerberg’s social network has distinguished itself as a stable, consumer-first guardian of its member’s trust and data.

While mainly an ecommerce play for now, Facebook’s potential checkout product will likely render data around the mobile ad and purchasing path, giving them even more ammunition for demonstrating ad effectiveness. As a direct moneymaker, the importance of the Facebook checkout may pale in comparison to the other path to purchase and user buying data the plan could lend to other even more lucrative parts of the business.