Payment giant PayPal has completed a $ 4 billion acquisition of startup Honey.
PayPal buys start-up company Honey for $ 4 billion
According to reports, this acquisition will make payment processor PayPal ahead of crypto-friendly payment competitor Square. PayPal is one of the largest payment processors, which aims to expand the online retail market share. With the rise of financial technology, PayPal faces greater competitive resistance.
This is also the largest acquisition in the history of PayPal. Honey has 17 million monthly active users, attracting coupon services and other discounts for up to 30,000 online retailers. Obviously, PayPal wants to “transform the shopping experience” for its 275 million customers.
The Honey app is becoming more and more popular at present, because it can automatically apply coupon codes to make shopping smoother. This startup, founded in 2012, achieved revenues of US $ 100 million in 2018 and is expected to reach US $ 200 million in 2019.
PayPal is facing competition from the Square payment application. Square’s Cash application is improving its competitiveness through encryption-friendly tools. On the other hand, PayPal is still skeptical about digital assets. Previously, it did not allow payments to be made to crypto services such as over-the-counter trading platforms or exchanges. Later, PayPal became a member of the first Libra Association to launch Facebook.
Square payment services generated $ 4.3 billion in revenue in the 12 months ended September 2019. PayPal reached $ 4.3 billion in the third quarter of 2019 alone. It has grown by 49% in the past year. PayPal has also been promoted by providing services for Uber and Spotify.
Money-saving tool Honey: Search for promo codes for you at online checkout
Many shopping sites will ask users if they have a coupon code at checkout, and users will often open a browser window and search on coupon websites such as RetailMeNot, but frequent invalid coupon codes will make them disappointed. Even give up shopping-this problem has a solution now, the same name Chrome browser extension of the startup Honey can automatically search for available coupon codes when consumers check out on the shopping website.
Users only need to click here: https://t.co/CS7SyXfFFj After installing Honey in the Chrome browser, a golden “Find Savings” will appear next to the “with or without promo code” on the checkout page of the shopping website Method) “button, click this button to automatically grab and try the relevant coupon code on the Internet (just a few seconds) without the user having to leave the shopping page. Even if the available coupon code cannot be found, the user has no loss; but if it is found, it can save a sum of money-for the “online shopping expert” who receives the soft delivery, the transaction is saved The accumulation of small amounts of money is still considerable.
In addition, for shopping sites, Honey apparently makes them less profitable, but it can effectively prevent consumers from giving up the checkout page.
Honey went live on Thanksgiving last year, and currently has 125,000 users installed (of which 97,000 are used every week), and has saved users a total of 108,000 US dollars. There are more than 400 shopping websites that support Honey, including e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Best Buy, and New Egg. In addition, there are hundreds of websites waiting in line to join-Honey now has only two full-time employees, it is inevitable that they are busy Come. Founder Ryan Hudson (Ryan Hudson) said that Honey has become one of the top ten popular apps in the Chrome App Store with almost no publicity, and the popularity is based on word of mouth from users.
In fact, Hudson is also a “serial entrepreneur” who has many years of experience in technology entrepreneurship. He was selected as a “new young technology entrepreneur” by “Mark Weekly” in 2005 with Mark Zuckerberg, but Honey It is his most successful startup to date. Hudson is currently running financing for Honey, and the progress seems to be very smooth-he said that the nine investors who met in San Francisco last week all recognized Honey, some confirmed the investment on the spot, and some agreed to carry out with other partners. The second round of talks.
One of Honey ’s biggest problems right now is profitability — it saves users money, but it does n’t charge anything. But the profit model Shenma is the future. Honey’s top priority is to make the scale bigger as soon as possible. (Yura)
(Editor in charge: Li Heran)
