• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, February 11, 2016

PayPal is offering a new set of “commerce tools” that allow merchants to place one-touch buy buttons pretty much anywhere a customer can see them—in apps and emails, on an ad, or within a blog or article. The service is currently free for retailers and merchants, in a closed beta.

After spinning off from eBay in 2015, Paypal acquired Modest, a startup that helped small businesses integrate buy buttons into their apps and emails. The new commerce tools are based on Modest’s technology.

PayPal currently serves 179 million customers, and its payments subsidiary Braintree as of Q2 2015 had about 154 million credit cards on file (compared to iTunes’ 800 million in 2014, and Amazon’s 200 million in the same time).

“PayPal Commerce supplies core API building blocks used in the development of their own innovative commercial applications for their users,” Braintree head of commerce Harper Reed wrote in a blog post.

Basically, users will be able to choose where buy buttons appear on their sites and apps.

For now, there is little data on the effectiveness of buy buttons. So far, Pinterest and Paypal haven’t made any money off of them. But the company has placed an early bet on what it thinks the future of ecommerce will look like, and if consumers start to incorporate buy buttons into their purchasing habits regularly, PayPal could position itself to become the next PayPal.

Paypal holds a strong position in the payments market, especially due to its acquisition of Braintree, which owns Venmo and runs payments for Uber, FanDuel, Casper, Pinterest and many others.