Posts tagged payment
Zappos Says Hackers Did Not Access Payment Data
Jan 16th
Hackers may have made off with data from as many as 24 million customers from online retailer Zappos.com, the company reported on its blog and in an email sent to employees Sunday night.
Anticipating a flood of customer inquiries, Zappos said it was turning off its customer phone system and only responding to inquires sent by email. In its message, the company emphasized that the database that stores customer credit card and payment info was not accessed.
In an email to customers affected by the attack, Zappos said the information that was compromised include “one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).”
The company is resetting all of its customers passwords. Customers who were affected by the attack were told — in CAPS LOCK — to create a new password as soon as possible.
The hackers gained access to the company’s database through a server in Kentucky. CEO Tony Hsieh said the company was working with law enforcement and would conduct an “ehaustive investigation.”
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Survey: 80% of Consumers Want Alternative Payment Methods to Credit Cards Online
Dec 13th
When it comes to mobile payments, how much do you really trust your credit card being attached to your smartphone? Is it secure? Are merchants going to sell your personal information or start sending you piles of junk mail? These are some of the concerns that a new report from Javelin Strategy and Research surfaced this fall during a survey of consumers’ fears of mobile payments and online transactions.
The survey concludes that four out of five consumers would spend more money online if they considered credit cards safer and had payment alternatives. Javelin predicts that an additional $109.8 billion would be spent by offering a “no credit card required” way to pay online and at merchants.
Sponsor
It is important to note that Javelin’s survey was commissioned by PaymentOne, a direct-to-carrier payments company. PaymentOne has a direct benefit in trying to get consumers’ off credit cards and start paying through their cellphone or cable bills. The survey was conducted in the fall of 2011 and polled more than 2,000 U.S. adults concerning payments preferences.
95% of respondents had mobile phones while only 36% had used that phone to pay for an item, be it an app, game, music or media streaming such as Netflix or Spotify. The top concerns around using credit cards online were privacy related concerning personal data falling into the hands of advertisers, marketers or malicious hackers.
There is a tenant in the payments industry that the more clicks that a user has to make, the less likely they are to make a purchase. These are often referred to as “pain point” or “friction.” Think about why Apple or Amazon do so well. Consumers enter their credit card numbers once and after that it is one-click processing with a password. Both companies have done masterful jobs of taking the friction out of payments.
On the other hand, the results of this survey should definitely be viewed through the lenses of a direct-to-carrier billing company trying to drum up support for its business model and get more online and offline merchants to use carrier billing, especially for smaller purchases. “No one is going to buy a fridge through carrier billing,” a PaymentOne executive said at CTIA in San Diego in October.
Users should think long and hard about storing credit card information on their smart devices. A report surfaced this morning that the Google Wallet leaves some information unencrypted if the device it is on is rooted. In the Android ecosystem there are also security concerns with malware-ridden apps that can theoretically gain root access and steal all information on a device. The Google Wallet sandboxes a lot of that data but as the Javelin survey points out, consumers have their fears regardless of the truth behind the technology.
What are your concerns with mobile payments? Is there a reason to fear using your credit card online or is the survey slanting its findings towards the benefit of its client? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Mobile Wallet Service Isis Will Support All Major Payment Networks: MasterCard, Visa, American Express & Discover
Jul 19th
Operator-led mobile commerce initiative Isis announced today that it has formed relationships with all four major payment networks here in the U.S.: Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. That means Isis’s upcoming mobile wallet has taken a big leap forward in terms of supporting all the ways people choose to pay, whether by credit card, debit card or even prepaid accounts.
Isis, which uses a wireless chipset-based technology called NFC, will enable people to use their phones to pay for transactions at point-of-sale, just by tapping or waving their phone.
Sponsor
Partnering with all four networks is an important milestone for the company, which had originally planned to launch with just Discover and Barclays U.S. But in May, the coalition, led by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, abruptly changed its course. Instead limiting its partnerships, it opened up to all – meaning all banks, all OEMs and mobile platforms, all payment networks, all card issuers and all operators. Anyone who wanted in, was in.
According to Jaymee Johnson, Isis’ Marketing head, the change meant that Isis would be the “connective tissue” that would work to bring the payments, mobile and retail industries together at last, all of which needed to be involved in order for NFC, as a technology, to really take off.
NFC, for those unaware, is a wireless technology that enables data transfers over short distances. It’s rapidly becoming the backbone of mobile payments and mobile wallet platforms, including those from Visa and Google, to name a few.
With Isis, not only will NFC support payments at point-of-sale, it will also support the ability to redeem mobile coupons and use store loyalty cards, among other things.
Isis will roll out to its first test markets, Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah, in the first half of 2012.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Alibaba decreases Yahoo value with payment processing transfer – Kingpin Webmaster News
Jun 24th
|
Alibaba decreases Yahoo value with payment processing transfer
Kingpin Webmaster News A discussion of mega-sized e-commerce sites may not be relevant to the average SEO executive's effort to build traffic for their clients. However, anytime we can better understand the global aspects of the internet we are all in a better position to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Here’s What Stripe, Stealth Payment Startup Backed by PayPal Founders, Will Do
Mar 28th
A large number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the Internet is going to disrupt financial services just like it’s disrupted so many other industries. Stripe is one of those, it’s a stealthy startup aimed to make online payments super simple. It’s being built by three Irishmen in Silicon Valley and has reportedly amassed a few million dollars in funding before it’s even launched, from some of the very top investors in technology including from Paypal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Michael Arrington got the scoop tonight, posting details on the funding of a company known about by a just few observers; Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon already followed the company on Twitter, for example, but has said before that he prefers to let other people report scoops first and then try to provide superior analysis later. This is a company we’ll be hearing a whole lot about in the future. According to Arrington, Stripe has raised money from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Google and YouTube backers Sequoia Capital, the super-hot Andreesen Horowitz and Ron Conway’s fund SV Angel. (The $2m that TechCrunch reports was invested seems surprisingly small for a crowd like that.) What makes Stripe different? It’s going to focus on data portability.
Sponsor
Little is publicly known about Stripe so far, but here’s what we’ve heard from a source deep inside Google.
Stripe will enable any developer to add payment and billing functionality to their own application with a JSON API that can be connected to in 5 minutes, with no branding requirements or directing users to the Stripe site. It will strive to be transparent and contemporary.
The price? “An all-inclusive commission of 5%, and a per transaction fee of $0.30.” Though none of the founders originated in the US, due to the complexity of an arguably antiquated financial system, they say they will be limited at first to payments between US parties.
Founders Patrick Collison, John Collison and Darragh Buckley appear to be focused on providing a nice, clean, developer-centric payment platform that they and their investors think could take on the world.
What’s Most Interesting About Stripe
What’s most interesting about the company is its philosophy:
The founders of Stripe feel very strongly about data portability. We’ll try to keep you with us by offering a better product than all of our competitors, but we won’t keep you by locking you in. If you want to leave us for somebody else, we’ll help you migrate your credit card data in a secure and PCI-compliant way. We’re programmers at heart, and we strongly believe in open systems and a level playing field.
That sounds great. Given the pedigree of this startup’s investors, it will likely join pre-launched developer-centric banking startup Banksimple on a short list of high-profile efforts to shake up the future of finance from the bottom up.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Visa Announces P2P Payment Service for U.S. Customers
Mar 16th
Credit card giant Visa announced a new peer-to-peer payment service today that will soon give its U.S. customers the ability to receive and send money from their Visa accounts. The new personal payments service moves Visa’s focus away from being just a handler for point-of-sale transactions and takes aim at an area that has long been dominated by PayPal.
Visa’s announcement includes a partnership with CashEdge and Fiserv, two person-to-person financial transactions companies, which will now have access to VisaNet, the company’s payment processing network.
Sponsor
In order to take advantage of Visa’s new offering, customers of participating financial institutions will be able to select a Visa account as the destination for funds when they make a personal payment. With someone’s Visa number and email address, you’ll be able to make a payment to someone’s credit card account.
Visa describes cash and check transactions as “inefficient” and indeed, there are many reasons why a move to offer this makes sense for Visa. Yet, despite Visa’s leadership as a credit card processing company, it might have a difficult task ahead of it in unseating PayPal as many people’s online financial transactor of choice. PayPal, after all, doesn’t require you have any credit card, let alone a Visa.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google One Pass: Publisher Payment System
Feb 16th
The Google Blog announced a new tool to help news publishers earn money online with their content. The system is called Google One Pass and it enables publishers to use Google to charge for content and subscriptions to their content. Google said, “publishers can maintain direct relationships…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Mobile Payment App Square Pushes Forward With $27.5 Million Funding
Jan 11th
Square had a bit of a rough 2010, but it looks like things are turning around for the mobile payment company. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the company just closed a new $27.5 million round of funding, quadrupling its valuation and setting it up for the year ahead.
Sponsor
Over the past year, Square, which was founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has run into a series of snags, from credit card dongles that didn’t work with the iPhone 4 to a lawsuit over the origins of that self-same dongle.
While we commented that the temporary fix to the iPhone 4 dongle (a piece of paper) didn’t inspire confidence in a realm where confidence is already hard to come by, Sequoia Capital appears to see things different – to the tune of $27.5 million. The funding raises Square’s previous valuation of $45 million to around $240 million. As part of the funding deal, writes Pui-Wing Tam for the Journal, “Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Roelof Botha, a former CFO of PayPal and one of the investors who backed online video site YouTube, will join Square’s board.”
When we first wrote about Square six months ago, the common refrain was “Who would trust using their phone to make payments?” Now, there are a number of other companies getting into the mobile payments game, as our own Sarah Perez surveyed earlier today, and the funding is indicating a confidence on at least one important end of the spectrum.
According to the WSJ, Square has also seen anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 companies sign up to use the service since it opened its doors last October. With companies signing up, funding coming in the door, we only have to wonder one thing – how long will it be before we actually run into this thing in real life? Have you, for one, paid for anything using something like Square?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Working On NFC-Based Mobile Payment Service: Report
Jan 4th
Google has its eyes on a mobile payment service that would allow users to pay for common goods and services by waving or tapping their mobile phones. That’s according to a BusinessWeek report that cites “two people familiar with the plans.” BusinessWeek’s sources say the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
