PayPal Stories Archive

One of the best parts of my job is the opportunity to sit down with small businesses to hear what makes them successful, learn about the roadblocks they encounter in operating their businesses and how PayPal can be the partner to help them. Small businesses like Tipsy Elves, Wild Mountain Soap Company, and Carbon6. These conversations help PayPal monitor the changes, challenges and emerging trends in this space, and create or enhance our products and services to help our merchant customers maximize their opportunities to grow their businesses. 

 

We routinely hear that the most pressing challenges from merchants are the lack of reporting and invoicing tools, and a desire to move more of these, and other core functions to mobile. Andthat’s exactly what we have done with our latest product enhancements specifically designed for small businesses.

 

Arguably, the least exciting part of running and managing a small business is reporting, but it’s one of the top requests we get from small businesses who want to more efficiently run and manage their operations. This is especially timely, considering we are in the middle of tax season and most small business owners lose more than a week every year to tax preparation. These are the major pain points we want to help small business owners eliminate.

 

PayPal’s new reporting capabilities give our business account holders access to detailed reporting and customizable reports to help them manage common activities such as, staying on top of sales and transactions and basic bookkeeping interactions with accountants and banks.

 

New updates include:

 

Invoicing is one of PayPal’s top business tools that drives significant value for our merchants globally. Based on feedback from our merchant partners, we have made several changes to the Invoicing experience to help small businesses better manage customer engagement, and get paid faster while on the go.

 

With a large number of people paying their invoices on mobile, we have now optimized the invoice notification email and payment flow on mobile --- making it easier for a merchant’s customer to see all of the invoice details. Customers no longer need to click to expand details. Additionally, we have also made it easier for merchants to send and manage invoices on mobile, by adding full invoicing capabilities to our new PayPal Business app.

 

We think the biggest improvement to the payment experience is offering One Touch consumer payments for invoices, extending the reach of PayPal’s most rapidly adopted product to more merchants and consumers. One Touch converts online buyers at a rate of 87.5%, outpacing all competitors with the next closest checkout option scoring 36.4% lower than PayPal on average*. 

Small business owners are always on the move, and the feedback we received consistently was that they need to keep track of their operations – invoices, payments, refunds, withdrawals, customer lists, and balances on mobile. In response, we recently rolled-out the new PayPal Business app, offering businesses an easy way to manage their PayPal account activity wherever their business takes them. The app makes it easier for small businesses to manage account activity, create and send customized invoices, manage customer lists and send payments reminders, while on the go. 

 

 

Transferring money is now simpler and more streamlined than ever before. The old ‘Add Money to PayPal’ and ‘Withdraw Money from PayPal’ functions have been combined into one flow called Transfer Money. The new flow, available globally, simplifies transfers by keeping all the ways you move money in one convenient place.

 

Being a customer champion and a better partner is our number one focus at PayPal, and you can expect more product enhancements for our merchant partners, so they can do what they love, owning and growing a business while we help them more efficiently run their day-to-day operations and all payment needs. If you are a small business and want to learn more go to our PayPal Merchant site to learn more about our services.