I’ve been expecting Paypal to take a shot at acquiring a buy-now-pay-later service provider, and Paypal just announced they are making a move to acquire Bill Me Later. Paypal’s definitely been missing out on a huge market that Bill Me Later owns. Bill Me Later’s only major competitor is a company called eBillMe.

While I personally think that this could be scrutinized as an anti competitive acquisition, especially considering Paypal’s monopoly over non-credit-card online payments, this should make Bill Me Later easier for smaller businesses t use. Until recently, Bill Me Later required ecommerce merchants to be processing in the seven figures per year, far out of reach for many smaller sites that could have greatly benefited from Bill Me Later.

It would probably be six months to a year before any reasonable integration with Paypal happens, but the acquisition is supposed to go through by 2009.