Cross-Border Trade: PayPal’s $400B Business

We’re living in a world where nearly everything – goods, services, entertainment, etc. – is available to purchase online. The expansive global e-commerce market affords consumers greater choice than ever before, and offers merchants access to an entirely new customer base. This represents incredible opportunities for large retailers and small merchants alike as they scale their businesses – including payments – to reach online consumers and expand their overseas sales opportunities.   At PayPal, we’ve been helping to connect sellers and buyers from around the world since 2003. Since that time, more than $400 billion in cross-border purchases have been made on our platform. In 2016 alone, we saw more than 9.8M merchant active accounts sell at least one item and 106M consumer active accounts purchase at least one item cross-border via PayPal. These transactions spanned more than 19,000 global trade corridors, 45 verticals, and 25 currencies, with roughly 60% of the transactions processed between countries outside the U.S.   As a leading global payments processor enabling cross-border trade, PayPal is arming merchants with the tools necessary to deliver on overseas shopping drivers to capture this market opportunity. Through our commissioned cross-border consumer research, we’ve identified international shopping behaviors and have used these insights to inform our merchant resources, platform updates for consumers and merchants, partnership strategy, and product offerings – including One Touch, Travel Cancellation Insurance, and Return Shipping on Us - to drive meaningful customer engagement.   In enabling businesses of all sizes to seamlessly connect with global consumers by providing tools and a secure payments platform for transactions, we are empowering our customers to reach broader audiences and grow their businesses. Cross-border trade can be a vital source of incremental revenue for merchants and provides greater commerce opportunities for consumers - our goal is to continue growing our reach to ensure we’re offering customers access to these new international sales and commerce opportunities.

Peggy Abkemeier, Global Head of Cross-Border Trade, PayPal