eBay plans to pay $370 million for an online payments service operated by VeriSign, as part of a broader agreement between the two companies, the auction giant said Monday. According to the two companies, VeriSign’s payment gateway business, which allows small businesses to accept credit card and other payment types online, processed more than $40 billion in customer transactions last year. eBay sees the service as a way to expand its own PayPal transactions division to a new category of small- and medium-size business customers.
The VeriSign service “perfectly complements PayPal’s existing payment services,” PayPal President Jeff Jordan said in a statement. “This acquisition allows PayPal to give our customers more choice in payment services and grow our merchant services business even more quickly.”
