Venmo's in-app purchases are now available to everyone

You'll soon be able to use Venmo for much more than just paying friends.

Nearly six months after taking its first steps to expand beyond person-to-person payments, Paypal-owned Venmo is now opening up its in-app purchase abilities to all its users. Beginning Wednesday, users will be able to make purchases within nearly a dozen apps using their existing Venmo accounts.

Previously only available to a limited group of beta testers, Venmo's in-app purchasing will work a lot like that used by Apple Pay and Android Pay. Users will now see a Venmo option when checking out in one of Venmo's partner apps.

After completing a purchase, users can choose to share the transaction to Venmo's social feed or split the bill with friends in the app. It's these social interactions -- splitting and sharing purchases -- that stand to set Venmo apart in an increasingly crowded payments space, according to Jo Lambert, PayPal's vice president of consumer product.

"From a merchant's perspective, it's pretty huge because it opens up a whole new customer base and referral network for our merchant partners," Lambert tells Mashable. "It basically opens the door to millions of socially-connected consumers."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

For Venmo, expanding into in-app payments marks a significant milestone in that it's the first time PayPal can begin to monetize its payments app in a meaningful way. While user transactions will work the same (free for debit and checking accounts and a 3% fee for credit cards), merchant partners pay a fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per each transaction.

The app has 11 merchant partners for now (it began its beta in January with just two) but Lambert says the company expects to add more apps soon now that the service is out of beta.

Here's a full list of all the apps accepting payments via Venmo:

• Munchery

• Gametime

• Poshmark

• delivery.com

• Priv

• Hop Market

• Wish

• Parking Panda,

• Dolly,

• Urgentli

• Boxed