Dive Brief:
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The PayPal Commerce Platform, a customizable e-commerce platform, was designed to meet the needs of marketplaces, e-commerce solution providers and crowdfunding platforms, according to a blog post written by PayPal's executive vice president and chief operating officer Bill Ready.
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The platform was meant to provide end-to-end payment offerings, data protection and compliance assistance, the company's blog post also said. Through the platform, merchants will be able to comply with regulations in more than 200 markets, tap into PayPal's artificial intelligence tools to detect risk and fraud, and access more payment services like mobile POS and business financing.
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This same technology is also available to larger entities such as Facebook, Instagram and Yahoo Small Business, the company said in a statement. As of Monday, the platform will be available in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. PayPal is also looking to offer this service in more than 40 markets by the end of this year, according to Ready's post.
Dive Insight:
Allowing more smaller merchants onto its PayPal Commerce Platform is the online payment system's latest move toward strengthening its market position.
Just over a year ago, the company acquired iZettle, a small business commerce platform that's popular in Europe and Latin America, for $2.2 billion. The company has engaged in partnerships with other major brick-and-mortar retailers like 7-Eleven and Walmart, but this offering appears to be an effort to level the playing field between large and small businesses.
The rollout of this platform also comes at a time when small businesses are adapting to a rapidly changing digital payments ecosystem. The payments options are expanding for small businesses, leaving small businesses to choose between competitive platforms like Square and Apple Pay. By offering up the larger pool of data to independent businesses, PayPal's fraud and risk detection tool could come in handy for small merchants looking to prevent data breaches, which could cost companies a healthy six-figure sum to investigate.
