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eBay has seen its revenues and income rise in the first quarter this year, boosted by PayPal's moves in the mobile payments sector.

The web marketplace reported a 29 per cent lift in revenue from the same quarter last year, rising to $3.3bn (£2bn), while net income was up 17 per cent to $725m (£450m), beating analysts' expectations.

GSI Commerce, a business that makes and runs online shopping sites for real-life shops and was acquired by eBay in the second quarter of last year, grabbed $237m (£148m) in revenue.

eBay has been expanding PayPal into the mobile payments market, joining the race to replace everyone's cash and cards with smartphone-loaded mobile wallets, and so far the move looks like it's paying off.

"PayPal launched an expansion of its payment services to offline merchants in the first quarter," the company said in a canned statement. "The Home Depot has launched PayPal payments in all of its nearly 2,000 US stores, giving shoppers the opportunity to pay using just their mobile phone number or PayPal payment card and PIN.

"We also launched PayPal Here in the US, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong. With PayPal Here, small businesses can now process almost any form of payment online or offline, including credit and debit cards, cheques and PayPal using only a smartphone."

The web firm is expecting around the same revenue for the next quarter, ending in June, with a forecast of $3.25bn to $3.35bn (£ 2.02bn to 2.08bn). It's full year forecast is for revenues of $13.8bn to $14.1bn (£8.6bn to £8.8bn). ®

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