PayTabs acquires Turkey-based social commerce platform, Paymes

By Leandra Monteiro

PayTabs, a Middle East payments powerhouse, announced that it had acquired a 100% stake in Paymes, Turkey’s largest social commerce platform.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Paymes will serve as PayTabs social commerce platform empowering millions of freelancers, artisans, consultants, home-based business owners, personal trainers and micro vendors across the Middle East and Africa to receive instant payments.

Micro merchants have been an underserved segment in the ecosystem and Paymes, with its simplex social commerce platform provides the key for webpreneurs to enter the main-stream payment market by enabling them to create web stores and sell online with minimum effort. After collaborating for over a year to launch social commerce tools in KSA, UAE and Egypt, the founders decided that PayTabs acquiring Paymes was the next logical step in line with PayTabs mission to power the global e-commerce economy with the ultimate super payment’s platform.

Having championed digital payments in the MENA region for a decade the synergy with Paymes will open new social media platforms such as Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram for millions of merchants that trade and sell over social media but have no legitimate way of collecting their funds. The acquisition provides an opportunity for PayTabs to grow and expand their payment footprint in the Eurasian markets, with futuristic market differentiators offered by the Paymes platform, such as live cashier inventory management and Paymes Reels.

Paymes, that currently serves over 850,000 users across Turkey and Azerbaijan will capitalize on the market presence of PayTabs to advance digital and social payments in the MENA region.

Paymes Co-founder and PayTabs Regional Head/Operating Partner, Hasan Jabbrov said, “Under the acquisition agreement, the Paymes team will expand our responsibilities to cover the many markets that PayTabs operates in throughout MENA. We will also be supporting PayTabs with our range of new social commerce products, a sector in which we have considerable experience. Exciting times ahead for webpreneurs in the region.”

Founder and CEO of the PayTabs Group, Abdulaziz Al Jouf said, “Payments are a commodity and our mission at PayTabs is to ensure that payments are easily made available to every customer segment from the super merchant or bank to a nano merchant. By acquiring Paymes, we are consolidating our position as the only payment solutions powerhouse that has a payment orchestration platform to offer payments solutions for any business size – micro or macro, across the globe.”

The news of the acquisition comes just weeks after PayTabs acquired Saudi Arabia’s Digital Pay in November 2022. Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Georgia are new markets on the horizon for the launch of Paymes in 2023.