As Amazon grows the reach of its digital payments tool Amazon Pay, PayPal is ramping up its feature set for e-commerce marketplaces.
In a blog post Monday, PayPal’s chief operating officer Bill Ready announced the launch of the PayPal Commerce Platform, which offers enhanced marketplace payments capabilities to enable quicker, more secure transactions supported by PayPal’s technology infrastructure.
“Regulations like GDPR and open banking are shaping a new environment for everyone to navigate,” Ready wrote. “With all this complexity — and opportunity — it is clear that powering global digital commerce is not something any one company can easily own.”
According to PayPal, the platform allows easy connections to PayPal’s 277 million users and more than 100 currencies. It helps merchants meet local compliance requirements across the more than 200 markets in which it functions; provides access to AI-powered risk and fraud tools; and offers access to more payment services, including a mobile point-of-sale system, business financing and the ability to offer consumer credit for purchases. PayPal did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
By focusing on e-commerce marketplaces, PayPal’s Commerce Tool will help other marketplaces compete with Amazon, analysts told Bank Innovation. The platform already is being used by BigCommerce, Facebook Marketplace, Grailed, Instagram, Lightspeed, Prestashop, Shopware and Yahoo! Small Business, and this move extends its reach.
Amazon Pay recently has been scaling up its efforts to enable Amazon Pay for non-Amazon retailers and marketplaces, and a recent tie-up with Worldpay lets more than a million more retailers enable Amazon Pay at checkout. “Amazon dominates that market, and they have very good tools,” said Paygility Advisors partner David True. “This is one way [PayPal] is thinking about ways to help merchants come up with a robust [payments] system without having to rely on Amazon.”
PayPal’s Commerce Platform also offers opportunities to scale the payments security features to new markets. It will begin rolling out in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. and will expand to more than 40 markets by the end of the year.
“PayPal historically has been good at serving the back end of e-commerce [platforms],” said eMarketer e-commerce and retail analyst Andrew Lipsman. “It’s a strong advantage for them and a big global opportunity to help merchants meet compliance and GDPR requirements.”
While PayPal’s e-commerce payments toolkit benefits marketplaces, the payments company also is aiming for another type of customer: merchants that want to build third-party marketplace functionalities into their owned and operated e-commerce platforms.
According to a recent merchant survey by Gartner, 49% of respondents have already deployed, or plan to deploy by 2020, a marketplace that offers products from multiple sellers. “Merchants are looking to become marketplaces themselves, so they can become mini-Instagram or Facebook marketplaces,” said Dayna Ford, senior director and digital payments analyst at Gartner. PayPal can act as a payments distributor to third parties, adding an additional source of revenue for merchants, she noted.






