E-Commerce

Payment-gateway services provider Digital River Inc. announced Monday that it is adding Bitcoin as a payment option for its small and mid-sized U.S. e-commerce merchants. The Minnetonka, Minn.-based firm thus apparently becomes the first U.S.-based gateway to support the leading virtual currency. n “Bitcoin continues to attract more mainstream attention,” …

Transactional credit providers have been few and far between. Bill Me Later launched 14 years ago and was snapped up by eBay Inc. in 2008. BillFloat Inc. started up four years ago and has changed its name to Better Finance Inc. It’s a challenging business requiring close attention to funding costs and …

Recurring billing is now available from Amazon Payments, putting the online payment service from Amazon.com Inc. on more equal footing with competitors that already offer the feature. n And when consumers update their payment cards, such as to replace an expired card, the update applies to payments made to merchants. …

EBay Inc. confirmed on Monday that David Marcus, president of its PayPal Inc. unit, is leaving to take a job at social-network giant Facebook Inc. John Donahoe, chief executive of eBay, will run PayPal until a successor is found for Marcus, who will remain at PayPal until the end of …

  Entertainment companies providing cable, satellite, and pay-television services experience the highest rates of global fraud, says 2Checkout Inc., an e-commerce payment-services company, in its inaugural Fraud Index report. The index is based on transaction data made via more than 600 million devices that connect to 2Checkout’s payment service. Columbus, …

  Payment card data remains a top target for criminals, but personally identifiable information, such as birth dates and addresses, is growing in favor among them, finds the 2014 edition of the Trustwave Global Security Report. Based on an analysis of 691 data-breach investigations conducted in 2013 by Chicago-based security-services …

Bitcoin may remain volatile and controversial, but the digital currency holds enough potential that it is starting to attract seasoned payments professionals, particularly in the business of merchant acceptance. Witness Bitnet, founded in January by a pair of former executives with payments processor CyberSource Corp. to make it easier for …

Law-enforcement agencies and government regulators may be skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, the Bitcoin virtual currency, but at least a few investors have a different attitude. Witness this week’s announcement by BitPay Inc., a processor that provides Bitcoin services to merchants. Atlanta-based BitPay said it had raised $30 …

  Shopify Inc. can eliminate learning new languages from its list of objectives. The online-commerce company announced this week it was adding 2Checkout’s payment technology, which processes payments in 26 currencies in 196 countries, to its POS software. The move does not displace the back-end payment-processing compact between Shopify and …

EBay Inc.’s first-quarter conference call Tuesday was as remarkable for what chief executive John Donahoe did not say as for what he did say. Asked by a stock analyst for an update on PayPal Inc.’s move into physical stores, Donahoe added little to what eBay and its PayPal unit have …