First it was Shopify Inc.; now PayPal Holdings Inc. will be adding its services to Facebook Inc.’s e-commerce platform, the company announced Monday.
Effective immediately, U.S. PayPal customers will be able to link their Facebook and PayPal accounts at checkout, while retailers will now have the option of adding support for PayPal to any transactions made through Messenger.
“For merchants, this will provide them a more direct opportunity to build relationships with the 192 million people around the world with active PayPal accounts,” PayPal’s executive vice-president and COO Bill Ready wrote in an Oct. 24 blog post.
The company did not mention whether or when the new service would be available in Canada.
Instead, Ready emphasized that incorporating PayPal into their Facebook-based e-commerce efforts would allow retailers to provide a “smarter, simpler,” shopping experience for consumers, one that could be easily personalized without having to worry about accuracy or security.
Customers, meanwhile, will not only be able to use PayPal to purchase items but receive notifications in Messenger, making it easier for them to manage their PayPal receipts, he wrote.
PayPal’s new Messenger support is not the first time the companies have combined their services, Ready wrote, citing as an example PayPal division Braintree’s partnership with Facebook and Uber, which has allowed riders to hail and pay for an Uber from Messenger since last December.
The company has also helped retailers purchase Facebook ads and sell products directly from the Shop section of their Facebook Page, he wrote.
PayPal was among the many companies affected by last week’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on DNS provider Dyn. Inc., in which a group calling itself New World Hackers claimed to use a network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to launch 1.2 trillion bits of data at Dyn’s servers every second.
The attack, which crippled dozens of other popular websites including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, and Amazon, does not appear to have affected PayPal’s reputation as a secure e-commerce solutions provider; the company is expected to post a 17 per cent rise in revenue during its next earnings call.