E-Commerce

Square Inc.’s official filing to go public means it will soon exit an exclusive club that’s becoming less exclusive by the month: the so-called unicorns, or privately held companies that are worth $1 billion or more. There are 143 such companies now, up from 123 in early August. Indeed, more …

Up to now, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo payments service has been strictly a mobile person-to-person product appealing largely to twenty-somethings, but within a year users will be able to pay with Venmo at PayPal merchants if the parent company’s plan works out as expected. PayPal disclosed Wednesday in its quarterly …

With the coming of EMV chip card payments to the U.S. point of sale on Oct. 1, merchants, merchant acquirers and credit and debit card issuers are bracing for an expected boom in card-not-present (CNP) fraud. Countless processors, payment gateways and tech companies have announced products and services meant to …

Two reports released Thursday point up the accelerating rate at which consumers are turning to a mobile device rather than a PC to pay an online merchant or another person. The news comes as major tech players like Apple Inc., Google Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. …

Payment processor First Data Corp. has acquired Spree Commerce, a provider of open-source software for 45,000 e-commerce storefronts. The addition of Bethesda, Md.-based Spree could bolster First Data as it competes with processors and tech providers for more business in the fast-growing world of online retailing. “Spree is at the …

By Kevin Woodward Klarna, a Sweden-based payments company that enables consumers to take 14 days to pay for online purchases, says its deal announced Tuesday with Overstock.com is the first of many it expects to make with e-commerce retailers this year. Retailer Overstock.com sells a broad range of merchandise, and …

By John Stewart PayPal Holdings Inc. and eBay Inc. went their separate ways just 45 days ago, but already the fallout from that split is beginning to make itself felt. EBay is telling sellers on its main online marketplaces that starting Sept. 27 it will stop supporting three electronic payment …

PayPal Holdings Inc. will eliminate volume-based price tiers and charge all of its small U.S. merchants 2.9% of the sale plus 30 cents per domestic transaction come Oct. 1, according to a notice the leading online-payments firm began sending to merchants Thursday. The 2.9%-plus-30-cents tier is the highest rate under …

While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …

By John Stewart Larger screens, buy buttons, and streamlined checkouts are expected to combine to raise the profile of smart phones in e-commerce. And now there are numbers to show just how much retail sales volume the devices will generate. Smart phones will account for $27.7 billion in retail mobile …