PayPal Offers Retail Media Assistance to Small Businesses

PayPal has introduced a way for its small business customers to launch retail media networks.

The company on Tuesday (Oct. 7) announced the launch of PayPal Ads Manager, designed to help small businesses “create billions of new advertising impressions for brands of all sizes” using a “fast-growing and highly profitable segment of digital advertising.”

Retail media networks, PayPal said in a news release, are now a multi-billion-dollar industry generating revenue by letting businesses sell advertising on small business websites and apps. For the most part, this has been the domain of large enterprises with substantial traffic and advertising and technical resources.

PayPal argues it is “uniquely positioned” to help small and medium sized businesses (SMB) with advertising as the company already works with tens of millions of merchants worldwide.

“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, but they’ve been locked out of the retail media revolution that’s transforming how major retailers generate revenue,” said Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager for PayPal Ads.

“PayPal Ads Manager changes that equation entirely. We’re enabling small businesses to participate in the same high-margin advertising model that’s powering growth at some of the largest companies in the world, while simultaneously creating thousands of new, high-quality advertising placements for brands.”

In a recent interview with PYMNTS, Dani Kenady, vice president of operations at Affinity Solutions, talked about the benefits retail media networks provide for merchants.

“They’re getting insights that they never had before,” she said, noting also that there’s a “handshake” effect as data passes among consumer-level accounts, issuers and the merchants.

“The strongest benefit comes from measurement and analytics,” she continued, noting that “there is near-instantaneous, if not instantaneous, measurement and attribution that leads to real-time reporting, which retailers love … and they can map out where their customers are coming from, and going to.”

That level of insight, she told PYMNTS, can speed and sharpen the digital transformation of retailers as they transform the look and feel of their own offerings and eCommerce efforts driven by browsing history and site engagement.

In other PayPal news, the company this week announced it would let American customers earn 5% cash back through its pay later program.

The offering, in effect now for the rest of the year, is designed to offer PayPal Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) users greater financial breathing room during the holiday shopping season.