PayPal is an online payment service I’m pretty sure most have heard of, and apparently is now threatening to overtake eBay’s struggling marketplace within a couple of years.

According to an article over on the New York Times by Verne G. Kopytoff, the online payment service accounted for 37% of eBay’s total revenue in Q3 as compared to 23% five years previous with eBay’s payment unit consisting mostly of PayPal had $838m in the 3 months ending the 30th of September which is up 22% from the same time a year previous.

eBay’s auction and retail ops they call marketplace pulled in a staggering $1.41 billion during the same period which is up 3%.

However if the current growth continues, PayPal will overtake eBay in revenue sometime around the year 2014, but this could happen even sooner if PayPal moves into mobile payment, and the company says that further growth will come from regular online payments as well as payments via mobile phones.

A recent upgrade now enabled users of the Apple iPhone to deposit cash into their PayPal account simply by photographing a personal cheque. PayPal is experimenting with mobile in a venture with Bling Nation, a startup that provides stickers that attached to a mobile handset which can then link to special in store terminals.