February 18, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
PayPal is one of the earliest and most successful ecommerce related brands to date, and their new partnership with Facebook will keep them entrenched in the space for years to come. Facebook has been pushing into the ecommerce arena more and more over the past year, as they work to promote their internal payment system, Facebook Credits. Currently, people use the Facebook Credits currency to buy things like virtual gifts, however many social games are using the currency in beta-testing. Many have speculated that Facebook would try to go head to head with PayPal and their payment system, however this partnership illustrates that the two companies feel it is better to work together in this space. Ebay owned PayPal, already has a massive global presences with operations in 24 currencies across 190 markets. Therefore the combined global reach of Facebook and PayPal makes them an almost unstoppable force in the payment space.
This new relationship between Facebook and PayPal make many people wonder if this is a precursor to more payment partner relationships. Most ecommerce sites typically give you multiple ways to pay, and it is very possible that Facebook could mimic this model to maximize the revenue they can generate from each of their users. Google has a competitive product to PayPal, called Google Checkout, which would also be a perfect fit into the Facebook ecommerce strategy. Industry analysts and bloggers, who follow Facebook, expect 2010 to be the year when Facebook gets deeper entrenched in the ecommerce space as part of their overall revenue model.
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.
