Adobe Systems world headquarters in downtown San Jose, California USA
Computer software company Adobe Inc. is the latest company to join the list of e-commerce providers. The company announced on Wednesday that it would be adding payment services to its e-commerce platform before the end of this year. While many believe that the decision stems out of the desire to be at an advantaged point in the competition with other rivals such as Shopify, Adobe Inc. said it is providing payments services to provide merchants with the assistance that they need to receive credit card payments.
After purchasing open-source e-commerce platform Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion in 2018, Adobe Inc. embarked on providing software to assist retailers with running their online stores, and since then the company has grown in its exploration of the opportunities that lay hidden in the e-commerce world.
Before now, businesses that used Adobe’s e-commerce had to provide payments systems for themselves. According to Peter Sheldon – Senior Director of Commerce at Adobe Inc., this system worked for larger businesses patronizing Adobe’s e-commerce services as they can negotiate with payment processors. By offering payments services, Adobe’s focus is on smaller businesses. According to the director, “what they’re really looking for is simplicity of operations and having all of their reporting and reconciliation in a single toolset”.
Adobe Inc. will be working with PayPal to process a variety of payment types which will include credit and debit card payments as well as PayPal’s pay-later offerings. The company said the service will be available first in the United States by at most the end of the year.
Speaking about the development, Jordan Jewell – Research director for Digital Commerce at IDC said that the company’s decision “is similar to Shopify’s in some way, but it’s also just trying to monetize different portions of what a seller needs to do online. Payments is a big one. There’s a lot of money that flows between hands in the payments world”.
His statement goes to say that payments are a huge part of any e-commerce business. For instance, Adobe’s rival Shopify saw over two-third of its 2020 $2.93 billion revenue come from its merchant services which is an umbrella category that covers payments.
According to Peter Sheldon, the processing deal with PayPal is not an exclusive one. Adobe says that it plans to expand to territories like Canada, Western Europe, and Australia in 2022, and might work with other processors in the course of its expansion.
