While I’m a huge fan of Amazon, an Amazon Affiliate, and a Prime Addict, I also like PayPal. I have a great credit account with PayPal, get cash back on expenditures, and I can setup alternative payments for my PayPal Debit Card – very convenient for the business. Just today I was on Sweetwater and wanted to purchase some new headphones via PayPal. I honestly purchased them via Sweetwater because of their PayPal Credit integration. (I’d add that the folks at Sweetwater are absolutely amazing – I even received a phone call from my assigned sales engineer after the purchase congratulating me).
PayPal is an incredible option for ecommerce because it doesn’t require that your store record any of the credit card data. That’s a beautiful security feature. I’d add that there is a downside to PayPal, though, and that’s their system in dealing with challenged charges. I have a colleague who paid their bill, then challenged it, and without any notice – PayPal just pulled the money back out of the colleague’s bank account. What transpired next was a terrible back and forth between the two parties. Since he didn’t have a bullet-proof contract, he eventually lost despite having delivered the work.
PayPal Market Share
As of 2020, PayPal’s dominates online with over half of the market share. Here’s a breakdown of PayPal and its competitors:
| Payment Processor | Number of Sites | Market Share |
| Paypal | 426,954 | 54.48% |
| Stripe | 145,565 | 18.57% |
| Amazon Pay | 29,305 | 3.74% |
| Square Payments | 18,015 | 2.30% |
| Braintree (Owned by PayPal) | 17,400 | 2.22% |
| Stripe Checkout | 15,444 | 1.97% |
| Authorize.net | 13,150 | 1.68% |
| Afterpay | 11,267 | 1.44% |
| Klarna | 9,388 | 1.20% |
| Vanco Payment Solutions | 8,977 | 1.15% |
| LawPay | 6,295 | 0.80% |
| Affirm | 4,261 | 0.49% |
| Worldpay | 3,518 | 0.45% |
| Sezzle | 3,471 | 0.44% |
Back to my point… PayPal isn’t simply a payment gateway anymore, it has its own ecosystem online. With 200 million active users, 16 million merchant accounts, and 1.7 billion transactions, #PayPal is the largest online payment system. There’s PayPal community that’s vibrant and both sells exclusively through PayPal and buys exclusively with PayPal. If you’re an ecommerce site, PayPal should surely be part of your payment options to capitalize on this community.
PayPal is a Revolutionary platform transformed the world of money service business. This infographic, The Success Story of The Biggest Online Payment System, takes a look at how Paypal made its way to the top of the online payments world and how it continues to grow bigger.
Here are some notable statistics on PayPal:
- In 1999, PayPal was voted one of the year’s 10 worst business ideas
- PayPal has 10% growth per annum compared to the industry average 3% growth
- 18% of all e-commerce is processed by PayPal
- On CyberMonday of 2015, Paypal hit a record 450 transactions per second
Hey, Douglas. I double-checked your market share data and it seems that you got it wrong with the market shares. I will link the image here, you might want to double-check: https://imgur.com/a/dZ9AvOj
Thanks, Alex! Do you have a resource that I could point to? I always like to provide a source for data like this.