How Will eBay Grow PayPal Organically?

Paypal Vice President Laurent Le Moal recently announced that she planned to turn PayPal into a larger payment services company, paired with further integration into off-line retail channels. The plan is to turn advertising more contextual, which means that content that is displayed on the Web will be chosen to be more relevant to what the user is currently browsing—for instance, if a user is on Nascar.com, they’ll see ads on the same page related to Nascar.

This practice has already been well-established by Google’s Google Ads services, which has already been placing small text links all over various webpages. Now, with the prevalence of cell phones and mobile ads, we will likely see a boost in contextual advertising across all platforms.

Going forward, more devices will improve information flow, which will allow consumers to experience e-commerce in the real world—instead of walking into a shopping store, running around the store to find items to purchase, it will be possible for a consumer to pick and choose products from a mobile device, and a machine will bring the products to the consumer, and the payment will be processed wirelessly.

“Our key challenge for the next three to five years is accessing the same high levels of information offline and sharing it with the retail in a nonintrusive way for the consumer—and being nonintrusive is extremely important.”

PayPal is well positioned in an environment where commerce will be driven by mobile devices. Mobile will drive commerce volume through PayPal’s platform. However, commerce volume will also come in other forms, like further expansion into emerging market economies, which will allow for remittance and other transactions to occur more seamlessly.