I’ve just read an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal which says “PayPal is near a deal to buy Braintree Payments Solutions, according to people familiar with the discussions”.
What makes the deal credible is that Braintree is the leader in mobile payments with $2B in annual volume and a ton of mobile-specific client libraries to make integration easy for merchants.
Normally we wouldn’t bother with rumour and speculation that PayPal was about to buy a company – PayPal, and eBay, buy a ton of companies each year so what makes this one different? Well it’s all down to Google.
If you remember Google Checkout has been scrapped and merchants won’t be able to accept payments after the 20th of November 2013. One of the three companies Google recommended as a replacement payment gateway was in fact Braintree.
It would be somewhat ironic if those merchants who were desperate to escape PayPal’s clutches, signed up for Google Checkout as an alternative and transferred Braintree ended up back as a PayPal customer.
More to the point, Braintree’s rates are pretty good at 0.9% plus €0.10 per transaction. It’s even better for those merchants that signed up from Google Checkout at 0.7% plus €0.10 which was offered as a lifetime deal. If Braintree are acquired by PayPal it’ll be interesting to see if they hold the rates forever.
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Hi Chris, we really must catch up soon, Nochex has some really exciting news in the pipeline!
Re-Braintree. Bear in mind that they have a minimum charge of 100 euros per month, and the transaction fee you quote does not include interchange (how much is that these days!?), and you should check this, but I have feeling they add VAT to all those charges as well.
Hope this helps, will contact you when things are a little clearer here!
Cheers, Peter
nochexs
pipeline must be the longest on record we have been waiting years for something to get out the other end
Hey Chris, This is good news for all of us who doing online activities. Taxes are the worst thing ever.
@Chris Dawson :
“It would be somewhat ironic if those merchants who were desperate to escape PayPal’s clutches, signed up for Google Checkout as an alternative and transferred to Braintree ended up back as a PayPal customer.”
And… it looks like that is exactly what is going to happen.
Now instead of a Google Checkout alternative they will be heating up Google again searching for a Braintree alternative!
A real shame as around a year ago Braintree launched in the UK, and — if the figures are to be believed — its non US business quickly zoomed up to be 25% of its overall revenue.
That’s a lot of potentially disgruntled British merchants. Will this be as smooth a transfer as it was when PayPal took over Verisign’s Pay flow? I think we have various reasons to be pessimistic.
But for nearly a billion dollars you can see why Bill Ready and his shareholders said a big fat yes.