Backers of mobile-payments programs are more than ever relying on merchants to foot the cost of rewards and offers. But for merchants to buy in, the rules of the game have to change. By Jane Adler As the mobile-payments business gets off the ground and card issuers look for new …

PayPal Inc. on Wednesday lost its top executive just as the e-commerce processing giant has embarked on an ambitious strategy to handle transactions for brick-and-mortar stores. The departure of Scott Thompson, who has been PayPal’s president since 2008, also represents the second loss of a key executive at PayPal in …

  With mobile payments based on near-field communication (NFC) technology struggling to gain acceptance, new figures from Starbucks Corp. provide yet another example of how non-NFC systems are jumping to a fast lead in the mobile race. The Seattle-based coffee king this week reported that it has handled a total …

  In the wake of strong growth in its mobile-payments business, PayPal Inc. on Tuesday made available an upgraded Android app that includes a widget for person-to-person payments using near-field communication (NFC) technology. The launch represents the San Jose, Calif.-based e-commerce processor’s first live product based on NFC, a short-range …

  We went out to San Francisco last month to take in X.commerce, a conference put on by eBay Inc. for its developer community. These are the people who, among other things, make payment applications work for the sellers, merchants, and processors that work with eBay and its payment entity, …

  What with the Durbin Amendment taking effect and serious moves in mobile payments, many observers had the feeling that the pace of change in e-payments quickened in 2011. But along with faster change come more problems. Herewith some of the most salient.   By Jim Daly and John Stewart …

  More and more shoppers are turning to e-commerce, but online merchants’ payment practices leave them poorly positioned to exploit this trend for sales, according to a recently released report. Notably, the biggest online and multichannel retailers meet on average only 36% of criteria for payment options, according to Javelin …

  PayPal Inc., a dominant processor of e-commerce transactions, has made no secret lately of its ambitions to move into the world of brick-and-mortar commerce. The only missing element was a physical token that account holders could use at the point of sale. Now it appears that void will soon …

  A startup called Openbucks this week introduced a service that lets consumers use merchants’ gift cards to buy goods online from other merchants. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company, which has been working for five months with gift cards issued by the Subway sandwich-shop chain, claims its “gift card payment …

  n A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Washington, D.C., has found that about 20% of U.S. adults uses a smart phone to access a location-based service or a so-called geo-social site, or a social network in which the user “checks in” with his or …