In a recent blog post, Bill Ready, SVP of Merchant and NextGen Commerce at PayPal, confirmed the purchase of Modest, an e-commerce tool that enables merchants to sell goods on multiple platforms.
Founded in 2012, Chicago-based Modest allows merchants to create multiple, customised online stores and integrate them within a number of e-commerce applications. Using ‘buy buttons’ to make shopping simpler for its customers, Modest has become a ‘‘an end-to-end experience that makes selling on any platform easier and simpler.’’
The solution was created by Harper Reed and Dylan Richard, both of whom were heavily involved in President Barrack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign – Obama for America.
Within the post, Ready explains contextual commerce, which he describes as a ‘‘new category of shopping.’’
Using buyable pins on Pinterest as an example, PayPal hopes that they can use Modest’ technology to tap into the contextual commerce market, whereby consumers can immediately purchase a product they find online, including on social media platforms.
The Modest team will now join up with Braintree, a mobile payment company that was purchased by PayPal for $800m in 2013. Both teams will work in PayPal’s Chicago office.
‘‘Contextual commerce is an exciting opportunity for PayPal, representing a new frontier for commerce that is rapidly growing. The acquisition of Modest will help us do amazing things in this area, faster than ever before,’’ commented Ready.
‘‘For merchants, this means PayPal will be able to offer a complete commerce solution (payments and order management) to help them add contextual commerce channels to the ways that they sell to their customers. For consumers it will mean seamless, simpler, and safer ways to buy the things they want, anywhere they discover them.’’
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