E-Commerce

It's no surprise, but it's still significant: retail electronic-commerce sales declined by more than 5% in the fourth quarter, the U.S. Commerce Department's Census Bureau reported this week. “This is the first-ever quarterly decline year over year,” a Census Bureau spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. The bureau began tracking e-commerce …

Universal Air Travel Plan Inc. is still in growth mode despite some weakness in its core corporate travel business, thanks in part to an ongoing alternative online-payments initiative that started in 2005. Now the specialty payment processor is looking to sign hotels as merchants. Processing volumes rose about 20% last …

Noca Inc., which this week launched a beta version of an online-payments product that relies on the automated clearing house network, plans to have a commercial service ready for launch by June, Pankaj Gupta, president and founder of the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup tells Digital Transactions News. One feature the …

A downward-spiraling economy is accelerating what had already been a rapidly developing trend for startups to introduce online payment methods as alternatives to bank cards. Indeed, one such company, Miami-based Mazooma Inc., launched a cash-based commercial service on Tuesday with the premise that consumers are looking for ways to buy …

Eighteen months after introducing it to developers as a beta project (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 6, 2007), Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday commercially launched its Flexible Payments Service (FPS) as the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of alternative-payment engines that includes industry giants PayPal Inc. and Google Inc. The …

This is the fifth installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 is likely to transform the payments business. Prior articles focused on how new providers are leading the transition from the first generation of e-commerce, where a buyer had a one-way relationship with a seller's Web site and …

With the recession throwing more and more people out of work by the day, payments processors are reporting that their merchants are experiencing sharp increases in e-commerce chargebacks stemming from so-called friendly fraud. This is the fraud that results when a consumer repudiates a transaction as unauthorized in hopes of …

Credit losses at Bill Me Later Inc. are manageable despite the economic downdraft of the past year, officials at eBay Inc. told analysts recently. The Timonium, Md.-based provider of so-called transactional credit for online transactions, which eBay bought last year and paired with its PayPal online-payments unit (Digital Transactions News, …

This is the third installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 developments are likely to transform the payments business. The online marketplace is morphing to payments embedded in top-line oriented-marketing services, and integrated infrastructure where small retailers can share the scale and cost savings of bigger players. Both …

This is the second installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 developments are likely to transform the payments business. Web 2.0 is still in its infancy, and skeptics about its business models abound. Meanwhile, most online merchants are still scrambling to shore up and extend their current Web …