Venmo Makes Its Website Much Less Useful

Venmo is making its own website much less useful. The peer-to-peer payments service no longer lets you make payments via its website, and it looks like this is just the start of an intentional effort to degrade the Venmo website.

Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, allows users to send payments to each other using their smartphones. However, until now, Venmo has offered similar functionality with its website. Unfortunately, the company is now changing tack.

Venmo Degrades Its Website for Reasons

Now, you can no longer send payments or charge someone using the Venmo website. Instead, you’ll have to use the Venmo mobile app on Android or iOS. And Venmo isn’t done degrading its website either, promising even “less functionality” moving forward.

@venmo This makes me really #sad…."Venmo has decided to phase out some of the functionality on the https://t.co/Dw7W551BsL website over the coming months." #CanWeGoBackToHowItWas

— V Lav (@Druzy920) June 14, 2018

As reported by TechCrunch, Venmo informed users about these changes in their account summaries for May 2018. However, to the annoyance of some users, Venmo hasn’t explained its reasoning or told users what else is changing.

“Venmo has decided to phase out some of the functionality on the Venmo.com website over the coming months. We are beginning to discontinue the ability to pay and charge someone on the Venmo.com website, and over time, you may see less functionality on the website — this is just the start. We therefore have updated our user agreement to reflect that the use of Venmo on the Venmo.com website may be limited.”

As a result of these changes, the Venmo website is now all about admin. So, you can cash out your balances, view your transactions, and change your settings. However, you’ll have to open Venmo’s mobile app to actually send and receive money.

Venmo Wants to Be Different From PayPal

There are two reasons why Venmo may have done this. First, it helps differentiate Venmo from PayPal, which is still seen as mostly web-based. Secondly, if the majority of people are using the mobile app, it makes sense to focus entirely on that side of things.

While Venmo has proved popular with the tech-savvy generation, it’s far from the only option for sending payments to other people. So, there are plenty of mobile apps which allow you to send money painlessly, including Google Wallet, you can use instead.

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