PayPal Market Share Statistics And Its History of Dominating Online Payment Processing
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 e-commerce 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 e-commerce 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