Introduction

PayPal is widely known for their ability to make sending and receiving payments simple and secure.  What you may not realize, though, is that by accepting PayPal on your website or application you automatically have the ability to offer financing options to your buyers.  This can help increase your conversion rates, and it can also increase average order total. Let’s discuss how this works.

PayPal Marketing Solutions

PayPal has introduced a set of tools called Marketing Solutions which provide merchants with some interesting features to help sell more products and services.  Two primary tools that are available with Marketing Solutions are Shopper Insights and Smart Incentives.

Shopper Insights

If you are familiar with Google Analytics or any similar tools you will feel right at home with Shopper Insights.  Available within your PayPal account you’ll have reports and graphs that provide valuable information about your visitors which can help you understand the quality of traffic to your website or application.  These reports will also provide recommendations to help increase sales.

Studying these tools and following the recommendations can help you optimize your content to perform the best with regard to conversion rates.

Smart Incentives

In addition to the analytics data provided by Shopper Insights, PayPal Marketing Solutions also includes what they call Smart Incentives.  Enabling this feature within your PayPal account will allow you to prominently display banners on your website which inform your shoppers about financing options with incentives such as “Buy now, pay over time” with special interest rates.  

The banner will be displayed on your site while your shopper browses, and cookies will be used to ensure the banners are not overwhelming.  

Banner ad for PayPal Credit displayed on website.

This banner is important to notify your buyer that financing options are available.  This may entice them to complete an order with financing when they would have otherwise canceled their order, and could also entice them to spend a little more since they know they can pay it back over time.  We definitely recommend that you enable these banners on your website or application.

PayPal Credit¹

PayPal Credit is the other half of the Smart Incentives feature.  Smart Incentives informs your shoppers about financing and incentive options, and when they choose to pay that way they will be using PayPal Credit.

PayPal Credit works like a credit card, but there is no physical card.  PayPal Credit is a reusable credit line linked to your PayPal account which can be used where PayPal is accepted.  Over time, you will pay this balance down the same way you would a credit card.

For buyers, this provides a great way to get what you need now and pay for it over time.  For sellers, this gives you a great way to offer financing options to your buyers without assuming any risk on your part!

How to Pay with PayPal Credit

For sellers this is very simple.  If you have PayPal payments enabled on your site then you have PayPal Credit available.  You don’t need to do anything else! That said, it is recommended that you make sure you have Smart Incentives enabled within the Marketing Solutions settings in your PayPal account so that buyers are aware that you’re offering this incentive to them.

For buyers, the process is simple.  During checkout simply choose that you would like to pay with PayPal.  From the funding sources, select PayPal Credit. If you’ve never applied you will go through a series of questions, and if approved you will then be able to continue quickly and easily using this new credit account for the purchase.  Here’s an example of what that looks like:

PayPal Credit selected as the funding source during checkout with the PayPal wallet.

1. PayPal Credit is subject to consumer credit approval.

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