E-Commerce

After bottoming out in 2010, identity fraud rose nearly 13% last year, according to new findings from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin’s findings also associate two hallmarks of the tech-oriented early 21st Century, social networks and smart phones, with a higher risk of identity fraud. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Javelin surveyed 5,022 …

Behind all the buzz about social payments and virtual currency is an often-overlooked fact: few social-network members today actually use digital money. The antidote for this ailment, according to executives in the social-networking world, is something they call monetization, which is simply a term for tactics that generate revenues from …

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A longstanding truism in the acquiring business is that smaller merchants tend to generate more profit than their larger counterparts. But now research has emerged to show that smaller online merchants are even more profitable for acquirers and processors than brick-and-mortar stores of the same size. In fact, across all …

Online merchants made some progress last year against fraud, but the fight is becoming more and more expensive for them in terms of both dollar losses and operational costs, according to a report issued on Tuesday. Indeed, the news for e-commerce sellers is mixed at best. While fraudulent orders as …

The Internet revolt over bills in the U.S. House and Senate aimed at thwarting online piracy might have a welcome side effect for merchant acquirers in possibly getting them out of an unwanted role as deputies charged with enforcing public policy. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia captured international headlines Wednesday when …

San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal Inc. later this week will expand its five-store point-of-sale payments pilot with Home Depot to 51 stores, chiefly in the San Francisco Bay area, according to John Donahoe, chief executive of eBay Inc., PayPal’s parent company, and interim president of PayPal. Speaking during a fourth-quarter conference …

PayPal Inc. on Wednesday projected its mobile-payments volume this year will reach $7 billion, nearly doubling the $4 billion it now says its mobile service processed in 2011. The final number for last year came in significantly higher than the $3.5 billion PayPal was estimating late in the year and …

The Internet, especially through online gaming and social networks, has spawned a number of new electronic currencies. Are any of these ready to make the leap into general usage, the way dollars and pounds and euros and yen are today? That was the fascinating question raised this week at a …

  Confirming its earlier signals that it does not want to be a direct U.S. merchant acquirer, at least not yet, Visa Inc. plans to sell its portfolio of just over 9,000 U.S. e-commerce merchants to merchant processor Global Payments Inc. within the next two months. Atlanta-based Global divulged the …