Just weeks after splitting off from eBay, PayPal has splashed the cash for Modest, their first acquisition as a standalone company.
Modest plays in a new area of shopping – contextual commerce. That’s where you’re on a site not specifically shopping but you come across a must have product and there’s a convenient button so that you can make it yours. That’s how the Pinterest’s new Buyable Pins operate, you probably don’t start browsing on Pinterest with the explicit intention of making a purchase, it just happens.
Modest allows merchants to offer an end-to-end experience that makes buying from you faster and easier than ever before. With Modest you can create an app (or seamlessly drop a store into any existing app), add buy buttons directly into emails increasing conversion rates and sell your products to customers wherever they are whether that be on your blogs, ads, or other content.
Bill Ready SVPGHoM&NGC PayPal*, told us “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. 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“.
Modest will now join PayPal’s Braintree team in Chicago.
* Bill Ready now has an impressively long title… “Senior Vice President, Global Head of Merchant and Next-Generation Commerce, PayPal”
