New PayPal Merchant Portal Gives Merchants One-Click Access To Tools

PayPal has a new tool in its arsenal to help businesses. 

The company is unveiling a new portal aimed at merchants as part of its PayPal Tools offering. In an interview with MPD CEO Karen Webster, Lisa O’Malley, Sr. Director Global Product Management – Merchant Engagement for PayPal, said that the redesigned merchant tool is a natural outgrowth of its original merchant services, which spanned, and continues to include everything from credit cards to invoicing, and tools that connect buyers and sellers. 

More recently, O’Malley said, “we’ve been focused on the merchant side to develop a consistent portal and service experience.” Now, with the launch of this new API-based portal, merchants are really one click away from their favorite and most often used tools. Once a merchant picks a favorite,” O’Malley continued, “it appears on the Tools menu and it doesn’t matter where the merchant is on the site – they can always get to that [function] that they use a lot.”

The “favoriting function” is valuable for PayPal as well, the company told PYMNTS, because it allows the company to collect data on what offerings merchants feel can help them most successfully grow the business, with the ability for PayPal now “to offer personalized service … and to see what trajectory a user or group of merchants may be on.”  With the ability to work with companies via their favorite options, PayPal also has the advantage of gaining insight to cross-border activities (and aspirations), as, say, they settle and reconcile transactions.

“PayPal knows that merchants of all sizes wear many hats, and we are committed to helping them manage and grow their businesses,” O’Malley wrote in the company announcement. “To make it even easier for merchants to access the PayPal tools, that help them run their business and discover new ones to grow it, we’ve redesigned our tools interface giving merchants the ability to personalize and access ‘Tools’ they need to effectively run their business.”

After receiving initial feedback from merchants in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Mexico, the portal has been rolled out to 95 countries — and should be in all 200-plus countries in which PayPal operates by the end of March.