E-Commerce

With the rapid spread of commerce on mobile devices, a key problem for merchants is getting customers to follow through with checkouts on tiny screens. PayPal Inc.’s answer to the problem is a solution that lets consumers check out with a single touch or click, and on Thursday it made …

  Lost and stolen credit and debit cards equipped with EMV chips may become the bane of e-commerce merchants. As the U.S. payment-card industry begins its gargantuan migration to smart cards, counterfeit fraud at the point of sale should decrease. But fraud in other places very likely will increase. That’s …

Electronic commerce hit a milestone in the first quarter by accounting for 7% of total retail sales for the first time, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau reported Friday. Preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau pegged seasonally adjusted retail sales at $1.15 trillion, with e-commerce totaling $80.3 billion. In 2014’s …

It’s becoming a familiar refrain in the payments industry: Payments made using mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, continue to garner more and more traction. The latest Mobile Payments Index from international payments company Adyen finds that such payments accounted for 27.2% of total global online payments made …

Apple Inc. and American Express Co. may be catching a wave. Users of wearable technology like fitness bands and smart watches—the kind of gadgets AmEx and Apple are mixing with payments and financial services—are not only younger and wealthier than owners of smart phones and tablets, they’re also more likely …

  Merchants looking for a way to secure e-commerce and mobile-commerce transactions made with credit and debit cards have a new option with the debut of an update to Acculynk Inc.’s PaySecure service. The Acculynk technology allows consumers to make PIN-based transactions on their PCs and mobile devices. The Atlanta-based …

Merchants face relentless and ever-changing attempts to make fraudulent online transactions, but measuring the effectiveness of rules in place to counter those attempts takes time. Now, CyberSource, a unit of Visa Inc., is offering a service called Decision Manager Replay that lets merchants test various anti-fraud measures for online transactions …

The U.S. payments industry is counting on EMV chip cards to eliminate much if not all of the counterfeit and lost-and-stolen fraud merchants suffer at the point of sale. They may well do that when EMV is fully deployed, but is it likely that rising e-commerce fraud will swamp any …

Intuit Inc., which markets the highly popular QuickBooks accounting product for small businesses, continues to reinforce the online version of the software with point-of-sale and e-commerce capabilities. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company on Thursday announced an integration for QuickBooks Online (QBO) with Shopify Inc., an Ottawa-based platform for e-commerce and …

Visa Inc. on Friday reported that it had signed a definitive agreement to buy privately-held TrialPay Inc., provider of an offers platform that connects merchants with consumers through targeted promotions. Visa will integrate TrialPay into its portfolio of services for merchants beyond pure payment processing. Financial terms of the pending …