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Dive Brief:
- Digital payments company PayPal said this week it’s added new features to its checkout integration for small business websites, including the ability to accept payments made with mobile wallet Apple Pay.
- San Jose-based PayPal also said this week it signed a multi-year partnership with Live Nation Entertainment that gives Ticketmaster customers the ability to pay for event tickets with a PayPal account, the company’s peer-to-peer app Venmo or PayPal’s buy now, pay later product.
- Additionally, the tie-up with Live Nation makes PayPal’s Braintree merchant processing business the primary global payment processor for Ticketmaster, according to a Monday news release.
Dive Insight:
The two announcements come as PayPal has been focused on improving its checkout functionality to defend its position amid an increasingly competitive landscape. CEO Dan Schulman said last June the company sought to enhance its checkout technology to make the experience better for both merchants and consumers, in part by speeding up the process.
Customers purchasing tickets through Ticketmaster can opt to use a one-time login, allowing them to save their information for future purchases, PayPal said in the release.
Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, controls about 70% of the ticketing and live event market, CNBC has reported. Live Nation faced backlash last November as the Ticketmaster website crashed when Taylor Swift concert tickets went on sale.
In the Monday news release, Peggy Alford, PayPal’s executive vice president of global sales, called the partnership between Live Nation and PayPal an “expanded engagement.” PayPal spokespeople didn’t respond to questions about the extent of the relationship previously, or the exact length of the multi-year partnership.
“PayPal’s scale and ability to provide payments options in global markets comes from the company’s experience over several decades and has resulted in a strong reputation among consumers as a trusted payment method,” Alford said in the release.
PayPal’s small business-focused announcement aims to give those merchants more of the same capabilities larger merchants have with online checkout. In addition to the Apple Pay acceptance capability, PayPal said Tuesday it’s added other features to its online payments service for those merchants that smooth out the checkout process and prevent declines or fraud.
These include giving customers the option to save their payment method on the small business’s website for faster subsequent checkouts, PayPal said. The merchant can save multiple payment methods in PayPal’s “vault,” which has a real-time account updater service to ensure payment methods are current.
Small businesses can also choose between flat rate pricing, or pricing that accounts for interchange that goes to a card-issuing bank plus the cuts that go to the card network and the acquirer, PayPal said.
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