Of Mad Men and Math Men - eBay's mobile revolution
- Summary:
- The powerful driving force that mobile has become in the e-commerce market can be readily observed in the growth predictions from eBay.
While over the next three years, e-commerce as a whole is set to grow at around 19% per annum, the mobile component of that is expected to enjoy a growth rate of 65%.
As CEO John Donahue states:
"Mobile continues to drive our commerce revolution. Go to London or Moscow, San Francisco or New York and mobile is transforming how commerce happens. Consumer behaviors and expectations are rapidly changing around the world and the pace of commerce innovation is accelerating.
“We are a mobile commerce leader in both PayPal and eBay. We continue to expect that each will do $20 billion of mobile volume this year.”
So important is mobile that Donahue cites the relaunch of the PayPal mobile app for iOS and Android as the main highlight of the past few months at eBay. Putting the power to pay literally into the hands of consumers is empowering new ways of transacting in a digital economy, he argues:
Such mobile ambitions will be furthered by the forthcoming acquisition of Braintree, he suggests:“The ability to pay at table, without having to wait for your check and offering merchants the opportunity to provide a closed group offer to a consumer in their stores - all of this is trying to increase the value that PayPal would bring to a merchant.
“Our success is strongly tied to enabling others to win, whether an entrepreneur or a global brand. We don't believe that commerce is a zero-sum game. It's not winner take all. Technology is changing the rules and not pushing the boundaries of commerce, enabling what we call connected commerce.”
“We have been watching Braintree for the last 12 to 18 months and really like the progress they are making in two very important markets.
"First, with developers. They built a really simple product that developers find very attractive to integrate into their new products and new businesses. We have been developing our developer product as well, but when we finally looked at it side-by-side, we decided that we were best off taking Braintree's and then merging ours into it.
“Second, Braintree has done a great job of becoming the payments provider for many of the new economy - or sharing economy - companies that are growing quite rapidly. Their payments solution really works well for those [companies].”
Braintree’s own acquisition of a start-up called Venmo is also appealing offering what Donahue calls a “compelling” user experience on mobile payments:
“It allows you to basically with one-click payment, pay across different apps that Braintree powers across someone's mobile device. We thought this company was a nice fit with PayPal and helps it build to almost a payments OS.
“We will do everything we can to leverage PayPal's strengths to help Braintree expand internationally and to ensure that we are developing the most competitive products for the community and also working with Venmo Touch to see if we link that to PayPal's user base and PayPal accounts.”
At first sight it might be thought that Braintree overlaps with PayPal’s existing Express Checkout functionality, but Donahue sees a critical differentiator:
“Braintree captures a 100% of its customers payments and that's the beauty of it. It covers 100% of their payments across all channels, whether it's mobile apps or web. PayPal Express Checkout only covers the PayPal portion. So PayPal will be one of the alternatives in the full suite of Braintree solutions, but they don't really compete.
“Some of Braintree's largest merchants are looking to add PayPal's Express Checkout button on as one of the ways you would pay. We are finding nice ways to leverage Braintree and PayPal. We will have the ability to have seamless account creation for consumers. So, if you are registered as a PayPal user, then you will be able to use any Braintree-enabled path or customer site.”
“What Braintree really does is, it's the unbranded payments and gateway platform. We will over time be merging the PayPal unbranded volume to the Braintree platform. It allows us to go side-by-side. It won't make the PayPal piece itself go any faster, but it just means, it's one last thing we have to re-platform on the PayPal site.”