E-Commerce

PayPal Inc. may have made headlines last week with its intermittent outages, but third-quarter numbers released this week by its parent company, Internet auction kingpin eBay Inc., show the online payments processor racking up significant growth in accounts, transactions, and dollar volume, while continuing to chop fraud losses. San Jose, …

The Canadian Payments Association is planning to implement a new rule for clearing Internet transactions involving the electronic debiting of consumer accounts. The association hopes to finalize the rule in December, which if approved would take effect early next year, according to Roger Dowdall, vice president of communication and education …

Evolution Benefits Inc. and 1-800 Contacts Inc. have reached an agreement under which the retailer of replacement contact lenses will accept Evolution Benefits' Benny debit card. The card, cobranded with MasterCard and Visa, will tap flexible-spending and health-reimbursement accounts set up by corporate employees, which the employees have funded with …

Evidence is starting to emerge that electronic bill presentment, like payment, is poised to explode. Statistics from Atlanta-based processor CheckFree Corp. show it was averaging a delivery rate of slightly more than 1 million bills a month during the third quarter of 2002. By the fourth quarter of 2003, it …

As the PayPal Inc. online payment service returned to normal yesterday, its technical problems of the past several days have raised the specter in some circles of the company's non-bank status. Some observers, particularly bankers, have long argued that as a non-bank financial entity, PayPal is not bound by many …

PayPal Inc. late this afternoon says it is making headway against the software glitch that has plagued its Web site since Friday, rendering it inaccessible at times for both buyers and sellers who use the PayPal electronic payment system. “We made progress today, and we've got eBay and PayPal technical …

The number of Americans ages 12 and up who bought sub-$2 digital content online in the past year has ballooned to more than 14 million, up from 4 million a year ago, according to a survey released today. “The data suggest that the online micropayments market has grown significantly in …

PayPal Inc. is in the midst of rolling out its first marketing campaign to sign up non-eBay merchants for its online payment service. Dubbed “PayPal for Business” and aimed at what PayPal considers small and medium-size Internet merchants, the campaign features a telemarketing effort, a direct-mail blast, and a new, …

The National Automated Clearing House Association, Herndon, Va., is preparing to launch a test early next spring of a new electronic transaction type for payments on the Internet. The new payment category would be best suited for payments to so-called spontaneous retailing sites?those operated by hard goods merchants, rather than …

Although Internet transactions have become a highly popular form of payment on the automated clearing house network, the emergence of direct debit online may stunt the growth of Web ACH transactions, an executive with a major Internet payment processor said today. Internet payments, which the National Automated Clearing House Association …