PayPal has two new competitors on the horizon. One you probably know - Stripe. the other might surprise you.

Stripe first. They recently acquired a large payment provider in Africa - Paystack, thus showing their ambitions to be a global payment provider on a scale with PayPal. With this, they accomplish two things. one, they stay on the track to growing internationally, and second, they keep these assets from other competitors in the payment space who might have similar ambitions. Good move.

The other? Shopify's Shop Pay. Huh?

First, you don't lose the Shopify name unless you have ambitions of going pro and being a massive independent business. I believe their ambitions are AWS-scale.

Second, the tie-up with Google was their first foray into powering payments for another platform. Expect them to try and get Shop Pay integrated into every major marketplace on the planet. Their recent moves into payments and subscription APIs turn them into a payments platform/aggregator of sorts that could have a worldwide reach and a wide array of payment options, with a consumer brand people know. Or that Shopify wants them to know.

Somewhat interesting prediction? Shopify will change the Shop App into the Shop Pay app within the next 6-12 months.

Rich Richardson chimed in with an interesting angle - I’ll share here in full:

I agree that Shopify has a built in market to exploit, as well as a brand/reputation to leverage. However, from my POV there are some inherent barriers such as Google Shopping's relatively limited success, and Amazon's unlikely participation. No one should doubt that Jeff is working on an enhanced, scalable, similar solution given their historical and by now predictable development process:

1- Identify inefficiencies in business processes

2- Develop a technological solution

3- Scale the solution into a platform

4- Offer the platform as a novel 3rd solution at scale

5- Repeat

I'm not certain what Amazon could do to change the trajectory of Amazon Pay at the moment - other than innovate faster. The real problem is consumer adoption.

Joe Tatarski published this post about some of the market share of payment methods on a sample of Shopify Plus stores. Some interesting stats in there.