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Klarna’s bid for PriceRunner, along with other rumoured M&A activity, highlights the growing trend for fintechs to attempt to grab a bigger share of e-commerce and bring the shopping experience closer to the payment.
On Tuesday (November 2), Swedish payments company Klarna announced the acquisition of comparison shopping service PriceRunner. The fintech claims the deal will enable Klarna to add new features to its app in the form of product reviews, rich product discovery and price comparisons to enhance the shopping, payments and banking experience for consumers.
Through the acquisition, Klarna will hope to offer its retail partners enhanced behaviour insight, increased website traffic from high intent consumers and optimised marketing opportunities.
This comes hot on the heels of rumours that PayPal was looking to strike a deal to acquire social media platform Pinterest for $45bn. The deal would have meant that PayPal could reach Pinterest’s 454m monthly active users.
The fintech later stated it was not pursuing the acquisition “at this time”; however, media reports speculated that a PayPal-operated social commerce marketplace could rival bigtech platforms such as Instagram, Google and potentially even Amazon.
Although the PayPal deal never surfaced, the rumours, along with the recent Klarna announcement, show increased intent from the payments industry to go beyond traditional storefronts into contextual commerce — the idea that merchants can enable purchase opportunities in everyday activities and environments.
According to David Fock, Klarna’s chief product officer, the Klarna-PriceRunner deal “further cements that Klarna will not be a marketplace but a viable and competitive alternative for retail partners vs Amazon, Google and Facebook”.
By combining a consumer ad platform with a payments service, the fintechs could create a comprehensive commerce platform, offering a seamless experience from finding the right product at the right price to the choice of ways to pay at checkout. This would enable consumers to consolidate the whole shopping experience into a single ecosystem.
It is all about trying to move payment, that is the point of transaction, “up the funnel”, closer to the point of product discovery, while providing a clearer closing of the advertising journey and subsequent re-targeting to users, an expert told VIXIO.
It also offers the opportunity to build a more merchant-centric offering that includes broader embedded banking and financial services propositions, he added.
