Strides by e-onlinedata Raise Profile of ISOs in E-Commerce Processing

In a sign that independent sales organizations specializing in e-commerce are achieving a higher profile, e-onlinedata said today it has signed up its 2,500th reseller. It also estimates it will pay out more than $1.5 million in bonuses and residuals over the next year. Resellers for e-onlinedata, which is itself a reseller for Authorize.net Inc., include Web hosting companies, Web designers, and shopping-cart developers. “We appreciate the fact that our success is driven as much by our value-added resellers as it is by our merchants,” Sloane Buchever, president of the Powell, Ohio-based company, said in a statement. A registered ISO of HSBC Bank, Buffalo, N.Y., e-onlinedata is riding a rising wave of Internet-based card transactions. Total e-commerce sales totaled $21.1 billion in the second quarter, up 26% from the year-ago period, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Friday. These sales, which do not include travel purchases, brokerage transactions, and ticket sales, now account for 2.2% of total retail volume in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the field is becoming more competitive, with PayPal Inc., a unit of online auction giant eBay Inc., announcing earlier this summer it is offering merchant-account services to online sellers, including virtual terminals (Digital Transactions News, June 28 and June 20).