Everybody knows that PayPal is a tool that many businesses can’t do without. What’s more is that the company has grown to such a degree that it has a hand in all sorts of different areas of commerce and industry. PayPal is involved with charitable giving, open source projects, international payment management, and they even provide business loans. Below are a few of the things that the company has to offer, which most PayPal users probably aren’t aware of.
1. Mass Payments
Sometimes you have to pay a lot of people at the same time, and PayPal actually has a pretty good solution for this. For things like survey incentives, scheduled disbursements, or employee benefits, it makes it a lot easier to have some kind of program that will send out the payments efficiently, and all in one shot. All you need to do with PayPal is send them the list of recipients and the amount, and it’s pretty much taken care of.
2. They Own Braintree
If you haven’t discovered their services, it’s worth looking into as an online payment solution for your business. Braintree allows you to accept just about any method of payment under the sun, including Bitcoin; they really haven’t missed anything. And of course a payment facilitator this valuable was quickly snatched up by PayPal. They bought Braintree, and elevated their service even further.
3. In-Person Payments
A lot of people don’t know that customers can pay in-person with PayPal. Naturally, we don’t assume that it has this capability because it is well-known as the gold standard of online payment providers, not in-store purchasing. It turns out that PayPal actually provides everything you need for traditional payments—a POS system, card reader, and a highly functional app to go with it.
4. Open Source
PayPal jumped on the bandwagon of open sourcing recently because, honestly, the product just advances much faster and much further when it’s open source, as many online services now know. They currently have multiple active open source projects, including a video player and card-scanning technology for mobile apps.
5. Business Loans
That’s right—PayPal offers business loans. Actually, this may be one of their more popular selling points. They call it Working Capital, and it is an unconventional type of lender, approving loans based on your history of PayPal sales, rather than your credit rating. It’s not a bad option, considering the time it takes to apply is around 5 minutes, and then another couple of minutes to have your money in-hand.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.