Mobile Commerce

Just as consumers have become accustomed to using their credit and debit cards across multiple shopping channels, so too are many expecting the digitized, and mobilized, versions of these cards to mimic that experience. That finding, from 451 Research LLC’s “Mobile Pay and Commerce Advisory Report,” suggests that early adopters …

With more and more consumers getting accustomed to shopping online and on mobile devices, merchants are losing more and more sales to checkout abandonment. “Conversion rates aren’t where we’d like to see them,” said Joe Walent, a senior analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, a payments consultancy. Walent, who spoke Tuesday …

Members of Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime membership service are enthusiastic users of the e-retail giant’s payments service, which it makes available to other merchants. In fact, some 50% of Amazon Pay’s users belong to Prime, according to Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gauthier, who spoke with Digital Transactions News Tuesday at …

• Visa Inc. announced its Visa Checkout digital wallet now has more than 12 million consumer accounts and is offered by more than 675 financial institutions in 16 countries. “Hundreds of thousands” of merchants now use the platform, Visa said, making Checkout one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the …

More than 80% of the fare value collected by the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System at its ticket windows and on its buses comes in the form of cash, so next spring the transit agency will start offloading that cash onto local 7-Elevens and other stores. DART and PayNearMe Inc., …

• WePay Inc. introduced a service that allows business-services platforms to offer card readers under their own brand to merchants for mobile acceptance of mag-stripe and EMV chip cards. Standard processing rate is 2.75% plus 30 cents. The first platforms to take advantage of the service are FreshBooks and Infusionsoft. …

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

• Groupon Inc. sold its Breadcrumb restaurant point-of-sale unit to Upserve Inc., a startup focusing on restaurant-management solutions. Terms were not disclosed, but Groupon will take an equity interest in Upserve, formerly known as Swipely Inc. Founded in 2011, Breadcrumb was acquired by Groupon in 2012. • Apple Inc.’s Apple …

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

Ouch. Merchant acquirer Square Inc. reported after Thursday’s market close that payment volume grew 45% year over year in the first quarter to $10.3 billion, but the company’s stock still fell 22% on Friday. Despite the strong payments growth, investors didn’t like a number of things they saw in San …