The Success Story of PayPal [Infographic from Play-N-Pay]

The Play-N-Pay infographic below clearly shows the tremendous level of success that PayPal is currently at and what was accomplished to get it there. This recap will go through a brief history of the company, PayPal’s current standing and statistics, and a demographic breakdown of their users.

The journey to becoming the best

In 1998, PayPal started as Cofinity, Inc., which was founded by Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. In the first couple of years, PayPal saw great success, growing almost 10% daily even when charging $5-$20 to sign up. By March of 2000, PayPal hit 1 million users and by the summer of that same year, they had reached 5 million users.

From 2000 to 2002 PayPal partnered with eBay and then was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. In 2014, PayPal had officially split from eBay, which led to a $49 billion market value jump. The company just kept growing from there. Continuing to grow in revenue, market share, and users. PayPal went on to acquire multiple companies, such as Venmo, Braintree, VeriSign and more.

The current standings

As the biggest online payment processor in the world, PayPal has some impressive numbers. 203 million active users, 16 million merchants accounts, and 1.7 billion transactions. When it comes to e-commerce, PayPal is on 768,745 websites worldwide. 18% of all e-commerce purchases are processed by PayPal. As e-commerce continues to grow, that value will grow with it.

Once those 203 million users tried PayPal, they loved it. PayPal is the 3rd-most preferred payment option after Visa and MasterCard. Among U.S. consumers, it is voted the 2nd-safest way to pay after using a credit card.

Every second PayPal processes more than $8,000 dollars, which comes to $315.3 million dollars every day. Even PayPal-on-Mobile’s numbers are impressive, reaching $1.2 billion in payments. Around 30% of all PayPal transactions are through the mobile app. It just kept getting bigger and better in 2017. Net income reached $384 million, which is up 5.2% from 2016.

PayPal is by far the leader in its field, with 83.02% of the market share. They continue to have growth per annum of 10% where other payment services only grow by 3%.  PayPal’s top competitors have a minuscule percentage of the market share, comparatively. The top five are Authorize.Net (2.11%), Square (1.88%), Klarna (1.61%), Amazon Payments (1.44%), and CC Bill (1.37%).

With this level of success, PayPal has been able to partner with other top-tier companies like Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Visa, MasterCard, Citi, and many more. The diverse partnership matches the diversity of the company’s employees. There are 18,000+ employees worldwide in 31 countries and at 56 offices. Out of the 18,000 employees, nearly half are female. They range over multiple generations the majority being millennials and come from 119 nationalities.

Who uses PayPal?

As the world’s top processor, PayPal has to handle transactions from around the world. PayPal is available in 202+ countries, able to receive money in over 100 currencies, and can withdraw funds from 56 currencies. The top countries that use PayPal are the United States at 43.86%, Germany at 17.61%, and Great Britain at 14.39%. Unfortunately, PayPal can’t be used everywhere. There are 13 countries where it is not allowed including North Korea, Burma, and Syria.

PayPal has the highest usage among those who earn $50,000-$74,999 annually. 87% of millennials use PayPal, which they use for both paying and receiving money. Where only 15% of Generation X and Boomers use PayPal. As we move into a more digital age, younger generations that don’t carry cash can still easily transfer money.