PayPal makes digital purchases even easier

PayPal is entering the buy button arena in a big way.



The new PayPal Commerce service, currently running in closed beta, allows retailers to embed buy buttons into any digital format they choose. This includes blogs, emails, online ads, apps, and social shares. PayPal Commerce is based on a set of open application program interfaces (APIs) and also offers a software developer kit (SDK), making it platform-agnostic and fully embeddable.



PayPal is not offering a lot of public detail about PayPal Commerce, but does say it will handle inventory syncing and will offer scalable support to retailers of all sizes.



PayPal is attempting to reach consumers for impulse buys at the initial point of engagement – promotional communications and/or mobile app experiences. The company has not specified how it will charge businesses for the service (presumably a percentage of transactions), but as the service is platform-agnostic retailers may be able to use it to sell to customers who do not have PayPal accounts.



In addition, since PayPal Commerce can be embedded into communications such as tweets and Facebook posts, it may cut into the profit generated by platform-specific buy buttons offered by leading social networks, including Pinterest and YouTube as well as Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook.



PayPal Commerce is only in closed beta and not many details have been released, so it will be a while before its impact on omnichannel retailing can be determined. But its arrival demonstrates that like mobile commerce, social commerce is hardly a settled marketplace yet.