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 can set up alternative payments for my PayPal Debit Card, which is very convenient for the business. Today, I was on Sweetwater and wanted to purchase new headphones through PayPal. I honestly purchased them via Sweetwater because of their PayPal Credit integration. (I’d add that the folks at Sweetwater are amazing. I even received a phone call from my assigned sales engineer congratulating me after the purchase.)
PayPal is an incredible option for e-commerce because it doesn’t require your store to 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 for dealing with challenged charges. A colleague paid their bill and then challenged it 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 delivering the work.
PayPal Market Share
PayPal 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 online ecosystem. With 200 million active users, 16 million merchant accounts, and 1.7 billion transactions, #PayPal is the largest online payment system. There’s a vibrant PayPal community that sells exclusively through PayPal and buys exclusively with PayPal. If you’re an e-commerce site, PayPal should surely be one 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, looks at how Paypal made its way to the top of the online payments world and how it continues to grow.
Here are some notable statistics on PayPal:
- In 1999, PayPal was voted one of the year’s ten 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
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