PayPal Teams With Bold Commerce to Expand Checkout Experience

PayPal has launched a new integration with eCommerce tech firm Bold Commerce.

“PayPal is working with Bold Commerce to bring payments and commerce together as the fintech company moves into the growing headless commerce market,” Bold said in a Wednesday (Jan. 25) news release announcing the collaboration.

The integration will let brands and retailers use Bold Commerce’s suite with PayPal’s commerce platform to launch sales beyond their websites and accept payment options that include PayPal and Venmo, PayPal’s pay later tools, and credit and debit cards.

“The checkout experience needs to extend to everywhere shoppers are today, which also means that a full range of payment options needs to be available to shoppers wherever they are,” Bold Commerce Co-founder Yvan Boisjoli said in the release. “Through this new integration, we’re making it easy and accessible to power checkout anywhere, with any payment method.”

The companies assert there’s a need for retailers to offer tailored checkout experiences for shoppers to prevent cart abandonment.

That’s in keeping with research by PYMNTS that found 91% of shoppers said a satisfying checkout experience is a major factor in determining whether or not they will keep coming back to a merchant.

“If you look at the checkout process today, it’s a big point of friction,” Karma Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Friedman said in an interview with PYMNTS last year.

“You need to put in your input, you need to sign up, you need to add your credit or debit card, which is why [merchants] still experience around 75% shopping cart abandonment,” he noted.

In other words, friction can be lethal — at least as far as sales go — in all its forms, whether that means slow processing speeds, merchants requesting too much identity information, or difficulty applying discount codes to orders.

In all, PYMNTS research with Checkout.com — as reported in “Building A Better Online Checkout Experience: The Key Features That Matter To Customers" — found that close to 75% of consumers used their preferred purchase method in their latest online checkout.

Meanwhile, more than half of shoppers pointed to other features, such as easy order confirmation, with security and account data storage cited by 60% of the consumers surveyed. Among consumers who wanted to use certain checkout features but found merchants did not provide them, lack of free shipping is still a major deal breaker, reducing satisfaction by 14%.