Tag Archives: ecommerce

PayPal Advertising?

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Yesterday PayPal announced PayPal Ads Manager

“PayPal Ads Manager gives tens of millions of small businesses access to high-margin ad revenue while creating valuable new inventory for advertisers of all sizes.”

“Retail media networks have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that generates high-margin revenue by enabling businesses to sell advertising on small business websites and apps”

As the Founder/CEO of Commerce Signals we brought card data to market primarily for measurement (now part of TU). It gave us a view of how advertisers performed and what data was valuable. I went into great detail on the challenges of  JPM’s Retail Media network in my June 2025 blog  Understanding How Payments Data Plays in Advertising (2025), and more generically in my 2021 blog Data Games. 

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Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

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The best, and perhaps only, operable protocol that can solve agent payment issues today.

Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with OpenAI, is a functional leap forward in enabling agentic commerce. While its open-source nature invites broad adoption, Stripe is uniquely able to “make it work” by leveraging its existing fraud-fighting assets. Another less reported benefit of ACP is payment rail agnostic operation. ACP will work for paybybank, PIX, EFTPOS, Swish, Bizum or anything else. Anywhere that Stipe’s device graph and Radar (Risk/Fraud) are effective. Stripe’s secure payment token plus risk signals allow merchants to operate the way they do today (no operational change).

ACP may only have a limited 2-3 yr runway as more advanced authentication methods become mainstream, and network rule sets/services advance to serve all agent providers (leveling the playing field).

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Could Stripe Drive eCom Stablecoin Adoption? (A: Maybe, but they wouldn’t do it)

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Following up on yesterday’s discussion about the potential for US Banks to issue stablecoins, the fintech world is abuzz after Stripe’s Sessions announcements covering AI and stablecoin. Given Stripe’s massive influence,  any move they make warrants attention. The question on many payment strategy executives’ minds: Is Stripe about to unleash stablecoins to circumvent traditional card rails for consumer payments? While the crypto-evangelists might be shouting “yes!”, a more pragmatic and skeptical view suggests this is highly unlikely, at least for the core retail checkout experience.

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Retailer Actions in Agentic Commerce

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Navigating a New Demand Paradigm and Its Two-Sided Imperative

The rise of agentic commerce, where AI agents could potentially execute purchases for consumers, signals more than an evolutionary step in e-commerce; it represents the emergence of a new type of demand: a direct customer buy order, theoretically complete with payment authorization. This presents a two-sided imperative for retailers. Firstly, ensuring your products are discoverable and favorably considered by these AI agents an “SEO for the agentic era.” Secondly, developing the organizational capacity to act on this demand, potentially bypassing traditional e-commerce pathways for direct fulfillment via APIs, with updates to fraud and risk screening.

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Stablecoins: Near-Term Predictions

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12 Page Blog

Key Themes

  • Stablecoin growth is booming in the areas of remittance, cross-border, disbursement, and B2B supply chain. 

  • Card volumes face no threat as they remain the “last mile” of use and an economic model for stable coin issuers. 

  • The STABLE and GENIUS acts are driving significant central bank discussions, with divergent views on response in Europe. 

  • Asia is developing differently, with the effectiveness of Ukraine sanctions and fear of dollarization driving central banks to a CBDC approach.

  • The value of any network corresponds to the combined investment made by all parties around it. Stablecoin is the fastest-growing network and at the core of most FinTech investments.

  • PayPal, and legacy remittance providers are under a substantial near term threat

  • Expect big tech and mobile platforms to support stablecoins in new ways (ex recurring payments and emerging markets). 

  • A small number of low profit Banking segments are also at risk, as Stablecoin issuers become banks and threaten niche payment providers like Cash App, as well as specialists in categories like MSB, NBFCs, ELMI, …etc.

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eCommerce 2025 – Wallets, Share Shift, Conversion Rates and Key Segments

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© Starpoint LLP, 2025. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog).

My estimates for how US eCom market share will shift in next 3 yrs are at the end of this blog.

eCommerce is not a single monolithic market. There are many “segments” to optimize that vary by geography, retailer type, consumer device, customer type (guest vs loyal), transaction type (recurring vs new), ad type, payment type,…etc. A great source of this information is Monetate (highly recommend). For example, let’s look at conversion rates by industry, device and region.

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MRC Learnings – September 2023

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Merchant Learnings

This week I was invited to speak at the Merchant Risk Council’s (MRC) – Santa Clara event. As a former banker, I never gave much throught to retailers. Fraud was something I worked to manage with Account Opening/KYC as a core focus because of the potential for regulatory hot water and NCLs as #2 because it drove reserves, profitability and investor scrutiny. Card transaction fraud was something we worked to keep under a threshold. 

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Real Time Payments in US – Strategic Shifts

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Short Blog. I’ll expand on this next month. 

As I’ve written about since September, and seen in yesterday’s press (WSJ), top US issuers are have created a new consortium with a first phase product centered on a white labeled SRC wallet. For investors, 100% of payment types in this wallet will be existing cards (no new retail payment network). Their partners are the key eCom gateways (Stripe, Square, Shopify, …etc). 

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