It started when we helped bring payments online in the late 1990s, gained momentum in the early 2000s with millions of Internet users buying and selling on e-commerce enabled stores and marketplaces, and has continued over the last several years with the rise of mobile commerce.

The explosion of mobile and the rise of the on-demand economy is now giving way to the next big shift in commerce: merchants and consumers connecting online anywhere in the contexts that they choose. Together with Braintree, we are continuously working to enable the newest and most seamless commerce experiences -- and today we are excited to introduce the next evolution: PayPal Commerce.

PayPal Commerce provides the foundation for merchants and partners to create a wide variety of contextual commerce experiences. It supplies core API building blocks used in the development of customer-facing applications to reach and engage consumers beyond just their online storefronts. The PayPal Commerce tools, which are currently in beta, allow merchants to securely sell across contexts -- email, social shares, blogs, articles, ads, in-page, in-app and anywhere consumers are online or on their mobile devices. As a result, PayPal Commerce enables consumers to more quickly connect with the things they want, at the point of discovery.

This follows our earlier efforts in contextual commerce, which include our announcement that Braintree was powering payments for Pinterest’s launch of Buyable Pins and our announcement that Braintree was the launch partner helping power the commerce experiences for the new transportation platform for Facebook Messenger.

Since we acquired Modest six months ago, we’ve been focused on building solutions to enable contextual commerce, and are excited to be powering solutions for merchants today as they build the commerce experiences of tomorrow.