Every company is an ad network these days—even your neighborhood coffee shop.
PayPal is rolling out a tool called PayPal Ads Manager that allows small and midsize businesses to set up advertising on their ecommerce websites. The tool also helps businesses manage their own ad campaigns that run across PayPal’s properties and the open web.
Small and midsize businesses are a core part of PayPal’s merchant base that already use PayPal’s technology as a payment option for shoppers. The idea is to help those businesses get a piece of the $60 billion that Emarketer forecasts will be spent on commerce media this year. By 2026, Emarketer projects financial media networks will reach $1 billion in ad spend.
“We’re enabling small businesses to participate in the same high-margin advertising model that’s powering growth at some of the largest companies in the world, while simultaneously creating thousands of new, high-quality advertising placements for brands,” said Mark Grether, SVP and general manager of PayPal Ads, in a statement.
Opting into ads
Small businesses that want to run ads plug a piece of code called PayPal SDK into their websites and set their preferences for advertising. For example, a restaurant might not want to allow other restaurants to advertise on its website. PayPal Ad Manager then uses AI to place relevant ads on the checkout page of small businesses’ websites.
PayPal said the ad tools will roll out first to the U.S. in early 2026.
