November 6, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Payment gateway giant, PayPal, which is owned by parent company Ebay, is on track to becoming the biggest earner for the company. Ebay has been struggling the last two years as the economy has declined and activity in their marketplace has slipped. PayPal, however, has remained strong during the rough economic conditions. Tons of transactions are still taking place via PayPal despite intense competition from other payment gateway providers. Amazon and Google Checkout are the biggest threats, but long time internet favorite PayPal still remains popular with consumers and merchants. With so many transactions taking place each day, it makes sense that their is room for a few big companies to earn their fair share of the market.
PayPal has had a big head start on the competition as it has been around since 1998 and has continued to gain market share every year. They posted $688 million in revenue last quarter, which was 15% up year-over-year. In addition many new people are using the service as their user base has grown from 65 million active users at the end of Q3 2008 to 78 million by the same time in 2009. One interesting note is the Ebay CEO John Donahoe expects PayPal to pull in revenues of $4 billion to $5 billion in 2011 which shows extreme confidence in the brand and their position in the market place. Almost every online merchant will accept PayPal as a form of payment regardless if they also offer their own unique micro payment service because they want to ensure they do not turn away potential sales. It is an easy thing to keep PayPal as a payment option so that your ecommerce store does not experience shopping cart abandonment because you do not offer the customers preferred payment option. Industry analysts and ecommerce merchants will continue to watch PayPal as it is such a vital component to day to day commerce over the Internet.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
I just wanted to let everyone know that you can get started on eBay and even Amazon. You can start small and ramp up later. Just DO SOMETHING now and get yourself some experience, and make some sales. After you make a series of sales you will have an increased sense of purpose, and will work harder at it.