E-Commerce

Merchant e-Solutions Inc., which on Tuesday announced it is actively marketing online PIN debit to both existing and prospective e-commerce merchants, credits the deep recession of the past year or so with helping to drive merchant interest in the service. “The recession has made [online PIN debit] more important,” says …

It's too early to make a final judgment, but a Web-site design and hosting company serving 25 online fashion retailers says acceptance of Amazon.com Inc.'s new PayPhrase is doing one of the key things online retailers want a payment service to do?reduce shopping-cart abandonment. Secaucus, N.J.-based eFashionSolutions LLC is one …

Payment card processing glitches struck in the U.S., Germany, and Australia over the past week. Although full details about them still aren't known, the foreign ones apparently involved applications that couldn't properly handle the change in year on Jan. 1?problems eerily reminiscent of those predicted in the late 1990s during …

With the 2009 holiday shopping season all but over except for some post-Christmas bargain hunting, several payments indicators show that merchant acquirers are processing more transactions than many observers expected when the season began nearly two months ago. Online shopping tracked by Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, the nation's largest e-commerce …

Alternative-payments processor Moneta Inc. announced this week it will start offering so-called transactional credit to its users at the end of the first quarter. The credit feature, which the Atlanta-based company is adding to an online wallet that currently relies on automated clearing house debits from users' checking accounts, could …

The Accel/Exchange electronic funds transfer network, which on Nov. 9 became the first EFT network to roll out online PIN debit to consumers, is pleased with results so far and has plans to begin a major recruitment drive to sign up merchant acquirers for the program next year, says Michael …

Prepaid card processors paired up with partners ranging from Facebook to Western Union to the MoneyPass surcharge-free ATM network in deals this week that expand the processors' distribution channels and transaction sources. In a cutting-edge deal that further opens up an Internet parallel to gift card giving, grocery chain Safeway …

Paper-based bill payments continued their decline in the third quarter while Internet bill payments gained more ground, according to the latest automated clearing house data. The accounts receivable conversion (ARC) code for paper checks sent to billers' lockboxes and then converted into electronic checks had 583.8 million transactions in the …

Secure Vault Payments, an online-payments program that lets consumers pay merchants from their checking accounts via the automated clearing house network, is catching on as a way to pay tuition and other costs at the University of Georgia, which began using the method in July in time for fall-semester tuition …

Electronic payments are showing signs of life as consumers open up their wallets and purses early in this holiday spending season. But just how wide they'll open those wallets and purses as the season goes on is uncertain. The early take is that volumes are up from 2008's anemic levels, …