E-Commerce

• E-commerce platform provider Shopify Inc. said it added 133,000 merchants in 2016, bringing the total to 377,500 by year’s end; gross merchandise volume hit $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter, up 94% from a year earlier. Shopify also says that since it launched Apple Pay for the Web, more than …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling to keep up with online stores, but they’d struggle far less if they could better deploy in-store technology, according to a report issued Tuesday. A big issue for shoppers is lackluster customer service, which last year cost retailers $150 billion in lost …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews How enthusiastic are consumers about shopping on their smart phones and tablets? Enough that mobile commerce grew to $22.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016, up 45% from $15.6 billion in the same period a year prior, says comScore Inc., a Reston, Va.-based data-measurement firm. That …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Westernunion.com, the online and mobile-payment service of The Western Union Co., is still small, but it’s the rising star of the world’s leading wire-transfer company, which posted a $355 million fourth-quarter loss in the wake of a recent $586 million settlement with the federal government over lax …

It’s been the winter of chest-thumping for e-commerce payments providers. Amsterdam-based Adyen, which is targeting the U.S. market from its San Francisco office, on Wednesday announced that its worldwide transaction volume jumped 80% last year to hit $90 billion from 2015’s $50 billion. On Tuesday, the secretive Amazon.com Inc. disclosed …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews One-third of the payments that consumers made using Pay with Amazon in 2016 were on a mobile device, e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. revealed Tuesday. Pay with Amazon enables consumers to use their Amazon wallets to pay for merchandise on other retailer’s Web sites. In a rare release …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ever since Ant Financial Financial Services Group let it be known in October that it is working with key payments players like VeriFone Systems Inc. and First Data Corp. to bring its Alipay mobile-payments service to North America, the industry has wondered about the Chinese company’s …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Payments professionals who suspect fraud is getting significantly worse were confirmed in their suspicions Wednesday with a report indicating identity fraud hit an all-time high in 2016, affecting some 15.4 million U.S. consumers. That’s up nearly 18% from 2015 and represents a one-third increase from the …

PayPal Holdings Inc. finished its first full calendar year separated from eBay Inc. with a tone that suggests a bit of swagger. “It was a landmark year for PayPal,” chief executive Dan Schulman told stock analysts Thursday afternoon. “We introduced a host of innovations. We bring to our merchants an …

Shipping costs and the total price are two primary inhibitors for consumers shopping online, found a survey from FuturePay Inc., which provides financing for online purchases. Indeed, 86% of the 1,500 consumers surveyed in the fourth quarter cited the cost of shipping as the top reason they opted not to …