PayPal Makes Headway With Flurry of Deals

Can an old dog learn new tricks? If the old dog is PayPal, the answer seems to be yes. Under newish CEO Alex Chriss—who’s about to celebrate his first anniversary in the job—the digital payments pioneer is striking deals that should rejuvenate its business and help it challenge newer rivals such as Silicon Valley star Stripe. 

Today, for instance, Amazon announced that it had added PayPal as a checkout option for shoppers buying things through the e-commerce giant’s Buy with Prime service. (Your head may be spinning, but essentially Buy with Prime is for merchants selling stuff through their own websites who want their shoppers to have access to Amazon Prime services such as free shipping.) Today’s deal followed one announced early last week, whereby PayPal became one of Shopify’s payment processors for its U.S. business, alongside Stripe.