BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vistaprint, the marketing and design partner to small businesses, today announced a collaboration with PayPal to bring innovative and safe touch-free payment solutions to small businesses across the country. Touch-free payments allow small business owners to process payments for goods and services without having to handle cash or credit cards, and avoiding physical contact with customers during the transaction. Through this collaboration, Vistaprint is enabling customers to leverage PayPal’s touch-free payment solution through a collection of customizable Vistaprint marketing products bearing their unique QR code.
“From the onset of the pandemic it became clear that small businesses would face challenges unlike any in recent history. However, if we've learned anything from our small business partners it’s that their resilience is grounded in their ability to remain flexible in how they run their businesses to meet evolving consumer needs,” said Emily Whittaker, President of Vistaprint, North America. “This collaboration with PayPal is one way we are building solutions that help small businesses make the necessary pivots to not only keep their customers safe but also create new, streamlined avenues for success well beyond COVID-19.”
To more fully understand the pivots small businesses are making to remain open while helping to reduce the spread of COVID-19, Vistaprint conducted a survey of 500 small business owners in the retail and food service sectors. The addition of touch-free QR code payment options is among the top small business pivots reported. More than half of respondents (52%) say they added this feature in 2020 as a direct response to the pandemic and plan to keep it in place long term. Furthermore, 42% of the small business owners polled believed of all the pandemic pivots they have made, touch-free payment is among the most important to their customers.
The small business solution offered by Vistaprint and PayPal meets an increasing demand from small business owners for access to touch-free payment options and directly aligns with previous findings from a PayPal-commissioned PYMNTS report suggesting that consumers are also looking for more touch-free options.
“Small businesses have been impacted in an unprecedented way during the Covid-19 pandemic and they have sought new, innovative and perhaps most importantly touch-free ways to keep their physical doors open,” said Nitin Prahbu, Vice President of Consumer In-Store at PayPal. “PayPal has always been a small business champion and with our PayPal QR Code technology, this is another way we are helping these businesses transact in a safer manner.”
Small business owners can go to www.vistaprint.com/touch-free-payments, choose a product, pick a template or customize with their logo, and have a unique QR code auto-generated for them. Current customizable product offerings include tabletop signage, business cards, stickers, decals, magnets, banners and more. Vistaprint and PayPal have initially introduced this small business solution in the U.S. with plans to launch similar online offerings for customers to create their own customizable touch-free payment marketing materials across key markets in North America and Europe throughout 2021.
In addition to this collaboration, Vistaprint has worked throughout the pandemic to anticipate and meet the needs of its small business partners by leveraging existing machinery and expanding production capabilities to produce face shields, face masks and pandemic-related signage. These much-needed solutions were made available within weeks following the onset of the pandemic and have helped small businesses pivot their usual processes and communicate safety measures to customers as they reopen under COVID-19 restrictions. Vistaprint is donating a portion of face masks sales to charities supporting small businesses and the communities they serve. To date, these efforts have raised more than $5 million in cash and in-kind product donations.
About Vistaprint
Vistaprint is the marketing partner to millions of small businesses around the world, empowering each one to live their dreams. For more than 20 years, we have helped small businesses look and feel credible through high-quality marketing products and solutions that include signage, logo apparel, promotional products, face masks, flyers, postcards, business cards, websites and digital marketing. With Vistaprint, small businesses are able to create and customize their marketing with easy-to-use digital tools and design-templates, or by receiving expert graphic design support. In 2020, Vistaprint acquired 99designs to expand its design offering via a worldwide community of more than 150,000 talented designers to make it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Vistaprint is focused on making great marketing and design accessible to every small business owner, allowing them to create a cohesive brand image for use in-store, online and on-the-go. To learn more, visit: https://www.vistaprint.com. Vistaprint is a Cimpress company (Nasdaq: CMPR).
About the Survey
Survey conducted for Vistaprint by OnePoll in December 2020 with a sample of 500 U.S. small business owners (0-10 employees) in the food service or retail industry.
