As e-commerce continues to boom on the Internet, Small Business owners have more options available, not only for processing payments, but also the business tools available to help them build their businesses. PayPal, the payment processing service owned by Ebay, and WooCommerce, the company that creates a store building option for Wordpress, have joined forces to create a suite of tools to help small business owners grow their businesses.
Whether this will help PayPal move their stock price higher remains to be seen.
The PayPal/WooCommerce suite of tools for small businesses explained
Tech Crunch reported that PayPal released a new service called Business in Box, designed to encourage more small businesses in the U.S. to use the PayPal service. The new service was developed with partners WooCommerce and Xero, an accounting suite, and the suite of tools is designed to help small businesses run more effectively. These new tools include offering a storefront for merchants, accounting capabilities, and support for taking payments for products and services both online and offline.
PayPal also offers working capital for small businesses now to help them grow.
The new suite of tools is targeted at small business owners who are currently operating offline but also want to move their businesses online. New business owners will also benefit from the suite of tools as long as they have a roadmap in mind and know what they want to sell. Although there are many platforms where small business owners may sell their products, like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, this gives PayPal a larger market share while offering more tools for small business owners in one convenient location.
A curated suite of tools for small businesses
ZDNet reported that the set of tools that PayPal is making available to its customers is a set of curated tools.
This means that the package of tools is the result of collaboration with other firms. In addition to the accounting, financial management, and online storefront tools, businesses will have the opportunity to track and manage their inventory too. PayPal plans to expand the offerings as they find new partners to add to the current set of tools.
PayPal rolled out one of its largest services about four years ago when it released, Working Capital. This program provides business loans to small businesses, and currently, it has paid out about $3 billion in working capital. PayPal's ultimate goal is to show new merchants that it is far more than just a payment portal for online business, and by using PayPal, small businesses can save both time and money on needed services by getting them under one roof. The PayPal app is currently one of the five most popular apps for smartphones, giving small business owners an additional option for running their businesses.