Apple developing new Payment Gateways – Targeting PayPal

Apple has showed us great results this quarter. Now their target for the next quarters and years are getting more rigid than before. And on the other side, It’s losing it’s premier partners like Google due to fierce competition.

Today, news is in that Top Apple executives hinted that they are looking on building a new payment gateway that will help users buy online just from any site. All these transactions will be valid for iTunes account holder– A good way to promote iTunes and earn from the transactions via new payment gateway.

Thing to note at this point is, this is Wall Street gossip and not confirmed news yet, but fans like to be updated on every aspects.

Anyway, such a service would make Apple a direct competitor to eBay’s PayPal  and Facebook’s still-in-testing, rumored-to-be-huge “Pay With Facebook” platform and even Google’s Checkout service, another reason to go war with Google.

iPhone users can already use their iTunes accounts to buy some virtual and subscription goods in third-party iPhone applications. That service charges developers 30% per transaction though. For a PayPal rival from Apple to take off on the rest of the Internet.

Normally, Apple only comes out with products that help it drive hardware sales. There can be two ways it can be explained:

1. Maybe this is Apple’s first step toward becoming a way for people to pay for goods offline. As consumers, we’d love this. No more waiting for the bartender to ring you up!

2. Maybe Apple sees the online payments business as an easy way to diversify its business. Apple computer sales growth has slowed a bit, and executives may worry the company depends too much on its iPhone/iPod biz.

Or both ideas could be wrong, along with our original gossip from WSJ.

We’re hoping it’s not, if only because we’d relish a new, meaningful competition over something besides search. A battle between eBay, Apple, and Facebook and may be Google too, over payments could prime innovation and help develop non-ad-supported businesses on the Internet.