Crawling before walking applies to mobile payment development growth, too.

Indeed, eBay-owned PayPal’s offline retailer payment efforts are growing up from merely test phases — soon.

“Our focus in 2011 was to build a set of products that could work in large, small and medium-size offline retailers. And 2012 is all about piloting, testing and learning,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe during eBay’s 1Q 2012 earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.”This year is a test and learn year so that we’ll be ready in 2013 and 2014 to roll out across different industry categories and globally.”

PayPal first announced last February that it was bringing its mobile commerce and payments platform to 2,000 Home Depot stores nationwide. The partnership grants the retailers’ customers the ability to pay by swiping a physical PayPal Card at POS or entering a mobile phone number and a 4-digit PIN.

Home Depot was the first brick-and-mortar retailer to accept PayPal in stores, but hasn’t yet done much marketing to foster usage.

“Frankly, the only people using it thus far are eBay and Home Depot employees and others that have happened to see it,” Donahoe said.

Consumer marketing is expected to occur in the May-June timeframe.

Plus, Donahoe teased listeners on the call to how PayPal has “several” other retailers under contract that will go live with PayPal’s payment technology during the second quarter. But before actively promoting the payment functionality to consumers, PayPal will want to learn how it “works” at partnered retailers.

“But again, with very much of a test and learn mindset, really, we’re trying to get some retailers in different segments to learn,” said Donahoe.

PayPal had teased retailers last fall with shopping demos of its emerging digital wallet at a pop-up shop in Manhattan.

Beyond offline mobile payments efforts, Donahoe gave some airtime to PayPal Here, a Square competitor that lets smaller offline retailers and merchants turn their smartphones into payment devices by attaching a dongle.

PayPal Here launched in mid-March and more than 200,000 merchants have signed up to receive PayPal Here.

“Our biggest problem there is we’re not sure we can manufacture enough devices in the next 60 days to meet up with the demand,” he said. “But that’s the kind of problem we want to have.”