BigCommerce Gives a Lift to Venmo’s Commerce Strategy As It Adds the P2P Service And Masterpass

The e-commerce platform BigCommerce Pty Ltd. on Wednesday announced two new supported payment methods, including PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo service. With the addition of Venmo, Austin-based BigCommerce gave a big lift to PayPal’s strategy  to find revenue for what has been a fast-growing but free peer-to-peer payment service, though merchant pricing was not announced.

Mastercard Inc.’s Masterpass is the other digital wallet BigCommerce added as the 9-year-old cloud-based provider seeks to reduce cart-abandonment rates for merchants by increasing payment choices. The company cited research indicating 70% of consumers walk away from an online cart before buying, a number that rises to 86% for mobile shopping.

The company said it is particularly concerned to combat the walkaway rate with the onset soon of the holiday shopping season. “When it comes to the last mile of checkout, merchants cannot afford to risk losing the sale because they don’t offer the payment method that a given customer prefers,” said Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer, in a statement. “Especially during the holiday rush, there’s no margin for error or omission.”

BigCommerce serves more than 60,000 brands, including Assurant, Ben & Jerry’s, Paul Mitchell, Skullcandy, Sony, and Toyota. In September, the company launched a new software development kit that allows merchants to more fully customize their checkout pages.

The move announced Wednesday couldn’t come at a better time for Venmo, for which PayPal’s top brass has been seeking revenue with a Pay With Venmo program aimed at allowing users to buy from merchants. PayPal estimated the service will generate about $70 billion in volume this year, and while it doesn’t break out Pay With Venmo activity, some 24% of users had “participated in a monetizable transaction” by October, PayPal chief executive Dan Schulman told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s up from 17% in July and 13% in May.

BigCommerce said Venmo will automatically appear as a choice on users’ phones without any coding by merchants so long as users have activated Venmo as a payment method.