Last week, Ebay announced that company revenues in the 2nd quarter were up 25%, driven primarily by its PayPal division, which not only increased 34% year-over-year but also celebrated the milestones of having the first million-dollar quarter as well as hitting more than 100 million active users.
Online retailers are quickly learning one of the lessons that brick and mortar retailers discovered long ago – multiple convenient payment methods are themselves a significant factor in a company’s offering to customers. PayPal is leading the forefront in providing online merchants easy-to-implement tools that let them accept all the most popular payment methods, including credit and debit cards with both one-time and recurrent charge models, thereby letting merchants increase their own revenues and attract larger market share by beating out competition that’s still working on older “cheque in the mail” models.
Particularly if you’re in the service industry, consider if methods of payment are important in the decision process of your consumers. Are you able to offer payment methods such as automatic debit or online bill payments, which your competitors are currently missing out on? If you were able to increase the convenience and variety of payment options for your clients, could you attract more business? If so, include that information with your next advertising creative, and monitor sales increases for results.
