Measuring the Impact of PayPal's Enterprise Solutions

The organizations poised to win in the digital economy are investing in digital commerce and payments platforms that can support the customers of today and tomorrow. To remain agile, an enterprise payments platform must be built for mobile, have an open architecture, have security at its core, and integrate deeply with adjacent commerce technologies.

In addition to offering one of the world’s most popular digital wallets, PayPal's enterprise solutions are empowering today’s leading businesses with flexible, end-to-end payments platforms. With industry payment solutions tailored to ever-evolving modern businesses, PayPal provides customers with acquiring services and a payment gateway that enables merchants to accept multiple payment methods online, in person, or via a mobile application.

PayPal's enterprise payment platform helps empower and support businesses. To find out more about its specific benefits, PayPal and IDC created a study to gauge the business impact of PayPal’s offering. To carry out its study, IDC spoke with three organizations who are already using PayPal enterprise solutions and are familiar with the platform’s features and costs.

Navigating enterprise business challenges in today’s digital economy

IDC has identified several hurdles that merchants face when addressing enterprise payment challenges in today’s landscape:

Expanding to new geographies

Merchants that are growing often run into challenges when selling into new geographies where they need to provide new localized experiences, offer region-specific payment methods, and abide by ever-changing local regulations. Many payments providers lack a large, global consumer network and region-specific knowledge to support multi-country and cross-border sales.

Leveraging open technology platforms

One of the major mistakes seen in the technology of past decades is closed proprietary systems and ecosystems, which attempted to lock customers in. Closed systems, which lack robust developer and partner tools, limit growth opportunities because they make it difficult for merchants to build for creative commerce use cases. Leading enterprise payment solutions on the market are personalized by leveraging a myriad of internet services and open technology platforms.

Optimizing digital checkout

Consumers gravitate toward commerce experiences that make it as easy as possible to find the right products, check out, and pay with their desired method. In many cases, the right checkout and payment experiences can result in higher spend and repeat purchases. Many homegrown and legacy payments systems lack the data and intelligence to support secure and modern digital commerce experiences.

Building mobile-first experiences

Mobile has quickly become a dominant channel for commerce, accounting for a majority of all global eCommerce shopping. However, many legacy digital commerce and payments systems weren’t built for mobile and other prominent commercial channels. To support mobile checkout interfaces and future channels, modern APIs are a necessity.

Key benefits of using PayPal enterprise solutions, according to merchants

IDC spoke with organizations already using PayPal’s enterprise payment platform, who reported that the platform helped them increase customer satisfaction and payment transaction efficiency. But the benefits didn’t end there. Specifically, the merchants interviewed found that partnering with PayPal helped support the following improvements:

• Better payment functionality for both internal teams managing payment systems and their customers.
• Improved ease of use for payment transactions and a greater range of payment options, leading to improved customer experiences and higher customer spend.
• Improved security through built-in features available in the platform.
• The ability to offer a wide range of flexible payment options.

Challenges and Opportunities

Challenges

Rapidly changing regulatory environment

While flexible digital payment capabilities are empowering merchants to rapidly build new omnichannel workflows, there are ever-changing regulatory challenges facing any payments provider. All technology vendors are being challenged with increasing regulatory scrutiny.

Quickly integrating cross-portfolio capabilities

PayPal has quickly been expanding its payments portfolio to include processing, payouts, fraud, and shopper marketing tools. While each of these point solutions adds important functionality to PayPal’s toolkit, there is still work to be done in connecting technology architectures and workflows. It is worth noting that PayPal does offer innovative data-sharing tools to help connect disparate systems and even providers.

Opportunities

Improved onboarding experience

Merchants, marketplaces, and commerce platform operators historically have disjointed onboarding processes across their various payments systems. By bringing payment processing, fraud, payouts, and more functionality onto a single platform, PayPal has the opportunity to make it drastically easier for these stakeholders to onboard across their portfolios.

Expanding out-of-the-box integrations

PayPal has a vast ecosystem of technology partners addressing CRM, accounting, subscriptions, and other categories. However, there is an opportunity to make it easier to connect with the most frequently requested third-party vendors.

Conclusion

In the digital economy, every organization is tasked with delivering exceptional commerce experiences to their customers by removing friction, offering the right mix of payment methods, and instilling trust. Future-looking merchants understand that flexible enterprise payment solutions are critical to meeting and exceeding these customer expectations.

PayPal is the proven provider of digital payments technology that powers many of the world’s leading and most innovative companies. IDC’s research shows that PayPal’s customers see measurable cost and business benefits across the entire payment value chain. We believe that these benefits will be multiplied in the coming year as digital commerce makes up an even larger share of the overall economy.

Download the full IDC study to learn more about this case study and gain a deeper understanding of how PayPal’s enterprise solutions are helping to build resilience and expand growth opportunities in industries just like yours.