That said, with the market more competitive than ever, questions remain as to just how long PayPal could continue to dominate the conversation, and what levels of market share it could maintain through 2020 and beyond.
What Makes PayPal Special?
As a system of online payment, PayPal is simple, efficient, and safe. Because of these factors, it has been adopted by many major services and online outlets for which security was and is paramount.
The online casinos that accept PayPal can be found here. They routinely operate with enormous quantities of deposits and withdrawals. This can be through regular play, or through the application of deposit matches and other bonuses systems, though the reliance on overarching security remains the same. In such regulated and necessarily secured industries, reliable payment systems are vital to the continued operation and that’s why there are increasing numbers of online slots that accept PayPal.
Over the years, PayPal has easily established itself as one of the best in this regard and, owing to its already vast reach, it is regularly one of the first choices when a business adopts online payment systems.
In terms of technical specifications, PayPal relies on a combination of encryption protocols, payback protection, and advanced AI to keep both sides of a transaction secure. These have advanced over time, as internet security and the threats and solutions around this concept have evolved. Ultimately, PayPal proved itself ahead of almost all forms of potential threats.
How Did PayPal Become so Popular?
Arguably the best benefit for PayPal came about in 2002 when the company became a subsidiary of eBay. At the time, eBay was a revelation in online purchasing, capturing the imagination of the world by being such an enormous and flexible service. In many ways, eBay maintains this popularity two decades later.
While not every auction on these early eBay systems accepted PayPal transactions, records state that prior to 2004, around 70% were compatible. Since that point, PayPal has acquired a significant quantity of other payment solution companies, including Honey, Venmo, Hyperwallet, and GoPay.
Through this, PayPal not only managed to absorb their market shares but also to adopt any technological advancements which these systems had made.
How do the Competitors Stack Up?
As of late 2019, PayPal as a company enjoys just over a 60% share of the online payment system industry. Note that this number applies to the number of websites that use the systems, and not the total currencies passed between each system, which is ultimately unknown.
According to online data and statistics company Datanyze, their competitors are far behind Paypal, with only Stripe being able to crack a double-digit share at 16%.
Following Stripe are the following online payment systems:
- Amazon Pay with 3.51%
- Stripe Checkout with 2.21%
- Braintree with 2.10%
- Square Payments with 1.81%
- net with 1.09%
- Vanco Payment Solutions with 1.00%
Market Direction
Given the overwhelming current success and market share which PayPal enjoys, being dethroned as the biggest in the industry appears a near impossibility.
According to Google Trends, this is reflected in the number of interest users of the search engine have given to these industries competing technologies. In late 2019, the popularity metric, taken from 1-100 on Google’s ranking system, gave PayPal a peak score of 100. Stripe, the next most popular of the online payment systems, peaked at a comparatively paltry score of 4.
We could find similar confidence in PayPal’s trajectory by looking into the increasing trend of payment volume over the last five years for which data is available. According to Statista, this trend has reliably grown, with PayPal’s total transactions increasing from $161 B to $172 B and $179 B through the first three quarters of 2019 alone.
Given all this current and historical evidence, indications all but guarantee the continued dominance of PayPal in 2020 as the online payment system of choice. Short of some seismic change, this pattern appears similarly poised to continue to at least the mid-2020s.
That said, upcoming possibilities involving the popularisation and acceptance of cryptocurrencies could soon create a significant market shift. In the next few years, however, PayPal will assuredly remain king.