Hot on the heels of inking a $2.2 billion agreement to buy mobile payments specialist iZettle AB, PayPal Holdings is marking another acquisition.

The company on Tuesday announced that it has picked up artificial intelligence startup Jetlore Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The transaction serves a much different strategic purpose than the iZettle deal. Whereas the latter provider concentrates primarily on physical retailers, Jetlore’s focus is e-commerce.

The startup has developed a pair of AI services that are used by the likes of eBay Inc. to boost online sales. Both offerings work by analyzing the data that retailers collect about their users’ buying habits to identify ways of better targeting them.

Jetlore’s first product, Predictive Layouts, applies this approach to optimizing web pages and emails. It uses information about how consumers  interact with a retailer online to help marketing teams personalize content for each consumer.

If an individual favors products from a particular brand, for example, Predictive Layouts could be used to put the relevant items at the top of the catalog. Jetlore claims that merchants can increase revenue per page by up to 80 percent with the software.

The startup’s other product is called Predictive Ranking and carries over this concept to the search function on retailers’ websites. According to Jetlore, the service can help ensure that consumers are shown products relevant to their interests when browsing merchandise.

The startup has raised $7 million from investors prior to its purchase by PayPal. In the acquisition announcement, the company said that it intends to fold Jetlore’s technology into its Marketing Solutions portfolio of business services.

The deal will create a new opportunity for PayPal to target large, established retailers with expansive online storefronts. The bigger a catalog is, the more work it takes to optimize its layout and contents, a challenge that AI-powered automation tools like Jetlore’s can alleviate. 

Image: PayPal