E-Commerce

  Transaction volume at electronic-commerce processor Litle & Co. grew 39% in the first quarter, Litle’s new owner, Vantiv Inc., reported late Monday. Vantiv, a big merchant and card-issuer processor based near Cincinnati, said Litle contributed only one or two percentage points of Vantiv's 23% increase in merchant transactions from …

  MasterCard Inc. chief executive Ajay Banga on Wednesday downplayed the company’s controversial digital-wallet fee and said critics had been generating the “wrong noise” about the pending fee. Banga’s comments came during the No. 2 payment card network’s first-quarter conference call with analysts, when Banga also said U.S. consumer spending …

  Discover Financial Services on Tuesday named six prominent merchant acquirers among 50 committed to helping the network bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. But a notable missing link is No. 1 merchant processor First Data Corp., …

  Nearly 20,000 U.S. merchant locations now accept PayPal, up from 18,000 three months ago, according to data released on Wednesday in tandem with eBay Inc.’s quarterly earnings report. San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal Inc. is a unit of eBay. The roughly 11% jump in merchant acceptance for PayPal since eBay’s …

  Merchant cash advances for online retailers suddenly are coming into vogue with the entry of PayPal Inc. into the market. PayPal recently disclosed that it plans to test in its home country a cash-advance program similar to one it has tested in the United Kingdom. Finance companies and merchant …

  Digital currency Bitcoin is making strides in its campaign to be viewed as a legitimate alternative to traditional payment methods. A major Bitcoin processor—Atlanta-based BitPay Inc.—yesterday announced it had processed more than $5.2 million in Bitcoin transactions for its e-commerce merchants during March. And earlier in the week, the …

  Consumers are paying fewer bills than they were in 2009, but paying more of them online and through mobile devices. Between 2009 and 2011 total consumer bill payments fell from 16.6 billion to 16.1 billion, according to a report released this week by Boston-based Aite Group LLC. The decline …

  Like metastatic cancer, the cyberattacks originating from ordinary hackers all the way up to national governments seem to be getting worse by the day, according to security experts who spoke Wednesday to a conference of e-commerce executives. Case in point: last week, citizens of South Korea couldn’t use banks …

Is MasterCard Inc.’s coming digital-wallet fee for online-payments providers such as PayPal Inc. a fair charge for systems that rely on the bank card networks to move their transactions, or a way for the established card networks to squeeze upstarts? That’s the gist of the debate that’s swept across the …

BitPay Inc., a payment processor for digital Bitcoin payments, has integrated its services with Amazon.com Inc.’s Fulfillment-by-Amazon Web service. It’s the first move into large-scale e-commerce for companies wishing to accept Bitcoin payments over the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, Atlanta-based BitPay says. Fulfillment-by-Amazon (FBA) allows a seller with inventory in Amazon’s …