Paysafe Group Limited, founded in 1996, one of the world's well-known specialized payments platforms, is expanding its influence. On the 16th of August, they announced that a definitive agreement to acquire SafetyPay was signed. The price is 441 million USD, and it is going to be provided in cash.
The digital sales reached about 211.7 billion dollars in the second quarter. That means an increase of 9.3% compared to the same period of the previous year. The sales reached 193 billion dollars a year ago, and that was a growth record - 43.7% compared to last year.
Each quarter starting from the Q2 2020 was showing significant sales increasing - 30 to 40 percent each. Now the Commerce Department data shows the slowest growth rate since 2008. However, it is still not totally correct to compare these periods as the pandemic significantly affected the regular consumers’ activity.
Overall the online shopping currently covers about 1/5th of the total retail purchases. However, the part also decreased from 20.3 in the second quarter of 2020 to 18.6 this year. That’s quite an odd trend since earlier, the share of digital sales grew each year, but again, this might be related to the pandemic. Store closures related to the quarantine restrictions forced customers to buy online. Now, when the situation slowly returns to normal, a slight decrease is easy to understand.
Now we can also compare the numbers for the first half of 2021 and 2020.
- eCommerce growth reached around 21.9% - from $08.51 billion to $335.15 billion;
- the part of online purchases last year was around 18.2% and increased to 19% this year;
- offline sales grew by 15.4% this year;
