Friday , January 10, 2025

Competitive Strategies

The Black Friday-Cyber Monday Shopping Lesson? Pay Attention to the Checkout

Add e-commerce platform Shopify Inc. to the roster of entities that experienced record sales during the recent holiday-shopping weekend, reporting $1.5 billion in volume from Friday through Monday. Two-thirds of that came from mobile transactions. Mobile commerce took the top spot on Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, according to …

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Cardfree Opens Order-Ahead API to Developers and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 11/28/18

First Data Corp. released its Holiday Insights dashboard, which shows real-time U.S. holiday spending trends, such as total spend percentage increase, today’s most active categories with average ticket and total transactions, and regional payment volume. To date, it indicates retail spending from Thanksgiving through Black Friday increased 6.4% year-over-year. Cardfree Inc., …

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British Competition Regulators Probe PayPal’s Takeover of iZettle

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority announced Monday that its initial investigation has found that PayPal Holdings Inc.’s September acquisition of Swedish processor iZettle AB could reduce competition or raise prices in the payments market. But whether the antitrust regulator will unwind the deal is far from certain. “While …

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Mobile Commerce Flourished on Black Friday At the Expense of Desktop Activity

More consumers took to their smart phones this past Friday, known as Black Friday, at the expense of shopping online with a desktop computer, finds Akamai Technologies, a Web-services company. Consumers using mobile devices accounted for 57.6% of online shopping on Nov. 23, compared with 35.9% for those using desktop …

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Bitcoin’s Renewed Volatility Casts a Spotlight on Its Shrinking Merchant Volume

Bitcoin’s return to volatility in recent days isn’t the only issue the digital currency confronts as it seeks to establish a toehold in the world of payments. As it turns out, its use in actual payment transactions is shrinking fast, according to numbers compiled by Chainalysis Inc., a New York …

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Mitek CFO Decides to Stay and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 11/27/18

Mobile remote deposit capture software provider Mitek Systems Inc. reported that chief financial officer Jeffrey C. Davison, who in August said he would resign effective Nov. 30, has changed his mind and won’t quit. Mitek’s board of directors accepted the rescission. Long-time chief executive Jim DeBello recently left and has …

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Consumers’ Small Business Saturday Spending Rose 38% This Year, AmEx Reports

After slipping the previous two years, spending at independent shops and restaurants jumped 38% to an estimated $17.8 billion on Small Business Saturday, American Express Co. and the National Federation of Independent Business trade group reported Monday. AmEx founded the Saturday-after-Thanksgiving promotion in 2010 to highlight locally owned businesses in …

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A Fraud Spike at Venmo Vexed PayPal Just As the Company Sought Venmo Revenue

PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …

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Secret Service Targets Skimmers on Fuel Pumps and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 11/26/18

Worldpay Inc. and Paysafe Group announced a partnership to establish a payments platform for the U.S. online-gaming and sports-betting sector. The U.S. Secret Service lit up Operation Deep Impact last week in a nationwide initiative to find and remove credit and debit card skimming devices on fuel pumps. Following a …

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Not All Financial Institutions Are on Board the Mobile-Banking Train

Payments experts may think mobile technology is crucial for banks and other financial-service providers, but it turns out a significant chunk of financial institutions don’t agree. Fourteen percent of respondents in a survey this summer of banks and credit unions said they not only don’t offer mobile payments and other …

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Digital Transactions