Though marketplaces have been around since the dawn of commerce, the last few years have seen a veritable explosion of them, particularly online. As of 2017, half of all online customers are regularly making purchases in digital marketplaces. By the year 2020, nearly 40 percent of all online retail is expected to be housed in marketplaces.
PayPal wants to help midwife that change along and is doing so today with the release of PayPal for Marketplaces. Drawing on what PayPal has learned from being the payments power behind some of the world’s largest and best-known marketplace players — think Airbnb, Uber and eBay — the solution is designed to provide an end-to-end global payment solution that can give any marketplace — even one that is just getting off the ground — the same capabilities of those best-in-class players.
“We’re beginning to roll this out globally and expect it to be available to all markets in the coming months. Marketplaces like AliExpress, Grailed and Rocketr are already using the product,” PayPal noted in a blog post, which announced news of the solution.
“We exclusively use PayPal for Marketplaces in our peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace,” Arun Gupta, CEO of Grailed, shared. “By integrating with PayPal’s end-to-end solution, we are able to focus on building the best possible marketplace without having to worry about the headaches that come with payment processing and ACH payouts. It has allowed us to be fully international from launch while providing comprehensive buyer and seller protection for our users. As a reCommerce marketplace, having PayPal on our side when it comes to trust and safety adds an invaluable sense of legitimacy to our brand. As an added bonus, the mobile optimization leads to increased conversion in our purchase funnel. Without PayPal, we would have to significantly increase the size of our team, and our business would likely be many years behind where it stands today,” Gupta noted on his experiences using the platform.
PayPal for Marketplaces features a full suite of flexible payment solutions for retailers accepting and disbursing funds — whether consumers pay through PayPal, credit or debit cards. Because digital marketplaces have unique structures, they also have unique needs — like collecting commissions and fees, setting payouts and multi-party disbursements — all of which PayPal can overtake and manage seamlessly.
“We can tailor our solution based on the marketplace’s need. For example, marketplaces that don’t want to take on all of the risk, we offer solutions that allow PayPal to help manage the risk. We also offer a solution for other marketplaces that want more control and risk ownership,” the blog post noted.
PayPal will also to continue to offer benefits like buyer and seller protection, risk and fraud detection capabilities and seamless checkout solutions that drive conversion for retailers.
“We’re excited for the adoption of PayPal for Marketplaces because it allows the Rocketr team to better service our own customers’ needs. We believe the platform will be instrumental in the digital goods marketplace, and we’re beyond excited to see our users supporting it,” Rocketr CEO Saad Kothawala said.