To drive further customer engagement.
Online payment giant, PayPal will acquire shopping and rewards technology platform, Honey Science Corp, in a deal valued at $4 billion. Honey provides its users with a mobile shopping assistant, offers and rewards program and price-tracking tools and alerts. Founded in 2012, Honey now has 17 million monthly active users and works across 30,000 online retailers ranging from fashion and technology to travel and pizza delivery.
The acquisition aims to simplify and personalise shopping experiences while driving conversion and increasing consumer engagement and sales for merchants. Honey will accelerate its growth by driving adoption among Paypal and Venmo’s more than 275 million active consumer accounts and sourcing exclusive offers from PayPal’s network of 24 million merchant accounts.
Honey will enhance PayPal’s ability to help merchants acquire and convert consumers by delivering offers that are personalised, timely and optimised across channels. Following the acquisition, Honey will retain its headquarters and brand in Los Angeles and co-founders George Ruan and Ryan Hudson will continue to lead the team, reporting to senior vice president, John Kunze.
PayPal president and CEO, Dan Schulman said Honey is among the most transformative acquisitions in PayPal history.
“It provides a broad portfolio of services to simplify the consumer shopping experience, while at the same time making it more affordable and rewarding. The combination of Honey’s complementary consumer products with our platform will significantly enhance our ability to drive engagement and play a more meaningful role in the daily lives of our consumers.
“As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalised offers, and drive incremental sales. The combination of Honey and PayPal adds another significant and meaningful dimension to our two-sided platform.”
Honey co-founder George Ruan said, “Honey’s vision has always been to give consumers the tools they need to make the best decisions with their money. PayPal shares that vision and together we can build powerful commerce capabilities that create real value for both consumers and retailers around the world.”
Honey co-founder, Ryan Hudson added, “Combining PayPal’s assets and reach with our technology, we can build powerful new online shopping experiences for consumers and merchants. We’ll have the ability to help millions of retailers efficiently reach consumers with offers that deliver more and more value to Honey members.”