Online payment company PayPal said on Wednesday it was preparing to offer a service for consumers to make purchases or money transfers using simple text messaging via mobile phones.

The move by PayPal, a unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc. (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research), marks a big step in bridging the worlds of e-commerce and the physical world of brick and mortar stores by giving consumers a pay as you go option via phones, analysts said.

The service, known as PayPal Mobile, will be launched in the next couple of weeks in the United States, Canada and Britain. Other markets worldwide will follow for the world’s biggest online payments service.

“PayPal is going to be launching a mobile payments product,” PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt told Reuters.

Word of the service had leaked out earlier on Wednesday when bloggers found links to test pages on PayPal’s Web site describing it. Details can be found at: (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/mobile/MobileSend

Posted: 03|25|06 at 4:33 pm. Filed under: Auction News.