PayPal has pushed out a new set of commerce tools for a new service dubbed PayPal Commerce. These tools will enable merchants to add one-touch buy buttons where it can be seen by a prospective customer.
PayPal Commerce, which is currently in closed beta, has a button that may be placed on articles, blogs, email, ads, in-app, social shares, in-page, as well as any content that consumers can access online or on their mobile device.
The service launched on Thursday and could potentially be an effective platform that will give a fillip to PayPal.
"A seamless and secure way to sell where your products are first seen - in emails, blogs, articles, apps, social shares, and more - without changing the way you manage your business," notes the service description.
The service will be free for merchants and retailers. The new commerce tools are based on the technology offered by startup Modest, which PayPal acquired in 2015.
The positioning of the buttons on apps and sites will be dependent on its owner. Presently, little data exist to support the effectiveness of buy buttons, the company is optimistic that e-commerce will eventually evolve in such a manner that they will become synonymous.
Based on this theory, PayPal is betting that once consumers begin to imbibe buy buttons as a part of their purchasing habit, the company could stand to be an early gainer and profit from this endeavor.
Traditionally, online shopping is largely associated with selling being carried out on the official website of the said business or an e-commerce portal catering to shopping. PayPal Commerce, however, is a departure from this philosophy and is delving into the notion of "omicommerce."
Basically, the idea is that PayPal Commerce hinges on a set of APIs that will act as building blocks for its partners.
"For our partners, PayPal Commerce supplies core API building blocks used in the development of their own innovative commercial applications for their users," says Harper Reed, Modest's co-founder and head of commerce at PayPal's Braintree.
The integration of third-party services to the PayPal Commerce platform will happen at the back-end. Since the merchant picks the spot where the buy button will be embedded, the checkout experience will become more intuitive, claims PayPal.
Basically, what PayPal Commerce tools will do is provide merchants with a one-stop solution to propagate the buy button. Moreover, they will be able to deploy PayPal's network to process the transactions seamlessly.
The company is pitching the platform as being open, which suggests that those who use the buy button tools for purchasing a product need not necessarily use their PayPal account to make the payment.
PayPal is currently inviting those interested to sign up for the beta.
