PayPal Acquires Swift Financial: Newsletter August 11, 2017

ImageThis week PayPal announced that it will acquire Swift Financial, a small business capital lending house. PayPal reportedly made the strategic move in order to supplement their own working capital service for small businesses. The main value of the acquisition will likely come from the new level of detail in the data PayPal has available to evaluate prospective small businesses. The online payments giant is looking to complete the acquisition this year, with no comment yet of any impact on current small businesses using PayPal merchant services.

Speaking of thoughtful acquisitions, this week Founder Thomas Smale was featured in an interview on the Solidity podcast, where he discusses what online business owners need to do to get their company ready for sale. Thomas is well known for helping successful entrepreneurs in their exit planning efforts, as discussed by Jeff Taylor in his recent Forbes article, where he discusses selling his 7-figure content business through FE International.

New listings this week include a multi-million dollar subscription box e-commerce business in the Vegan niche with c.38% CAGR, over 5,000 paying customers generating $124K in MRR and a low churn rate of just 6%. We also listed a six-figure e-commerce business in the eco-friendly home furnishing space. Both of these listings have already proven incredibly popular so request more information today if you are interested!

If you enjoyed the highlights of our last meetup or are looking for more opportunities to connect with local peers, join us at our next Boston e-commerce meetup on August 23rd at WeWork South Station. The panel discussion will be centered around how you can create a trustworthy brand. Our call for panelists is still open, so if you would like to participate or know someone who would be a great fit, let us know!

Continue reading for more on PayPal’s acquisition of Swift, updates on Facebook’s link vetting process, and India’s recent bar on the Internet Archive.
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Deal Highlights

New:

Subscription Box E-Commerce – Vegan Products – $124K MRR

  • Strong year over year growth, reaching 38% CAGR for the period 2013 to 2017
  • Large customer base with over 5,000 paying customers
  • Low MRR churn rate of only 6% over the trailing 12 months
  • Authoritative brand in the rapidly growing vegan niche
  • Low owner involvement with an entire team willing to transition post-sale

Yearly net profit: $410,000
Asking price: $1,670,000

E-Commerce – Sustainable Home Goods – $30K gross/mo

  • Diversified sales across hundreds of SKUs
  • Established business with 10 years of operations
  • Stable traffic with over 100,000 unique users in the trailing 12 months alone
  • Authoritative brand in the growing “green” niche

Yearly net profit: $67,000
Asking price: $132,000

In the News…

PayPal Acquires Swift

PayPal has announced its plans to acquire Swift Financial, a lender that provides small businesses with capital. In the face of increased competition, PayPal reportedly made the strategic move in order to bolster their own working capital service for small businesses. The acquisition comes with the hopes of expanding PayPal’s underwriting capabilities and the granularity of data it can use to evaluate prospective small businesses.

PayPal and Swift had a relationship before the acquisition, but this deal “will enable us to better serve small businesses by enhancing our underwriting capabilities to provide access to affordable business financing solutions to more businesses to help them grow and thrive,” according to PayPal’s VP of small business lending Darrell Esch.

In the announcement, the company is looking to complete the acquisition later in the year.

Facebook Unmasks Disguised Links

Facebook recently announced a new initiative to disable disguised links that breach their safe link policies. The efforts will be led by a combination of artificial intelligence and an expansion of their human review process to locate links in ads that are disguised as normal on desktop, but which redirect users to the banned sites on mobile. Advertisers or users who are discovered to be sharing disguised links will be banned from Facebook.

Since researching how much time people spend on particular sites they navigate to via the social media platform, Facebook has been making stringent moves to improve the quality of the links in people’s newsfeeds, and this new initiative is reportedly part of that effort. If you’re publishing content for your online business on Facebook, ensure that they don’t violate the policies and that they don’t lead to banned sites.

India Bars Internet Archive 

Due to requests from two production companies, India has cut off access to their Internet Archive. Two Bollywood production companies who wanted to stop the illegal viewing of their films online appear to have instigated the bar. A judge ordered internet providers to block 2,650 websites; among them, the Internet Archive.

This is not unprecedented; in 2014, India mandated that local internet service providers block the Internet Archive, along with other notable sites like Vimeo and 30 others for fear that they provided users access to “Jihadi propaganda.” Employees at the Internet Archive have made attempts to inquire after the reason for the block, with no response from officials yet.

The website bans had been requested by Prakash Jah Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment. Affected users’ access to these sites is cut off with an error message simply stating that the sites are not available, with no justification provided. Reactions to the block are general confusion, as people believe this was done for no apparent reason.