E-Commerce

Merchant processor Vantiv Inc. has won one of the biggest retail merchant-processing contracts out there—the U.S. Postal Service’s credit and debit card business, including its USPS.com online component. Counting post offices, branches and substations, the Postal Service has more than 35,000 retail outlets in all 50 states, U.S. territories and …

Point-of-sale payment card fraud will be easing off thanks largely to the introduction of EMV chip card payments to the United States in the next few years. But fraudsters, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research, will be back in stores armed with cards using stolen credentials …

U.S. consumers shopping online in the first quarter of 2015 used smart phones to place 18% of all online orders. That’s according to the Demandware Shopping Index. Demandware Inc. is a Burlington, Mass.-based e-commerce platform. The index found that smart phones, too, accounted for 38% of the overall Web traffic …

By John Stewart Wednesday’s announcement by MasterCard Inc. that its MasterPass digital-payments service has signed up home-furnishings and décor e-retailer Wayfair, along with several Wayfair properties and mobile apps, threw into relief the progress the two giant general-purpose card networks are making in e-commerce and in-app payments. Once the province …

Merchants, whether they sell online or in stores, consistently have one bugaboo about their payment-processing service: They want it to be cheaper. Online retailers, in particular, which pay higher card-not-present interchange rates, can use some simple practices to make a dent in these costs, as outlined this week in a …

With the rapid spread of commerce on mobile devices, a key problem for merchants is getting customers to follow through with checkouts on tiny screens. PayPal Inc.’s answer to the problem is a solution that lets consumers check out with a single touch or click, and on Thursday it made …

  Lost and stolen credit and debit cards equipped with EMV chips may become the bane of e-commerce merchants. As the U.S. payment-card industry begins its gargantuan migration to smart cards, counterfeit fraud at the point of sale should decrease. But fraud in other places very likely will increase. That’s …

Electronic commerce hit a milestone in the first quarter by accounting for 7% of total retail sales for the first time, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau reported Friday. Preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau pegged seasonally adjusted retail sales at $1.15 trillion, with e-commerce totaling $80.3 billion. In 2014’s …

It’s becoming a familiar refrain in the payments industry: Payments made using mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, continue to garner more and more traction. The latest Mobile Payments Index from international payments company Adyen finds that such payments accounted for 27.2% of total global online payments made …

Apple Inc. and American Express Co. may be catching a wave. Users of wearable technology like fitness bands and smart watches—the kind of gadgets AmEx and Apple are mixing with payments and financial services—are not only younger and wealthier than owners of smart phones and tablets, they’re also more likely …