PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: PYPL) will move forward with their $4 billion acquisition of Honey Science Corporation, a technology company responsible for a coupon browser extension and corresponding mobile app. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2020.
The hope is that the acquisition of Honey will continue to grow PayPal's base while vastly improving PayPal and Venmo user experiences. Venmo is owned by PayPal.
Honey allows users to apply available coupons as they shop from multiple stores at the same time, which could be seen as an alternative to shopping on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Honey has managed to attract around 17 million active users on a monthly basis. PayPal, which has been around for over 20 years, has roughly 300 million users.
"What's exciting is that we can take the functionality Honey now offers - which is product discovery, price tracking, offers and loyalty - and build that into the PayPal and Venmo experiences," said John Kunze, PayPal SVP of Global Consumer Products and Technology. "When Honey says they're putting money in the pockets of their customers - that's perfectly in line with what we want to do. We want to make digital commerce and financial services more affordable, easier to use, more fun and more accessible to people around the world," Kunze said.
PayPal CEO Dan Schulman seems confident that the bargain shopping company's services will profoundly benefit PayPal and its users.
"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," Schulman said. "As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalized offers, and drive incremental sales. The combination of Honey and PayPal adds another significant and meaningful dimension to our two-sided platform."
Honey was co-founded in 2012 by George Ruan and Ryan Hudson.