Retail Decisions Inc. and I4Commerce Inc. have both signed on new Internet merchants for e-commerce transaction processing. Indianapolis-based Finish Line Inc., which operates 560 stores selling athletic wear in 46 states, has signed on for ReD's ebitGuard online fraud detection service to screen for fraud on its Web site. Kent …

Competition in the nascent market for micropayments, or transactions of $5 or less, is about to become even more heated. A 10-year-old maker of e-commerce systems for retailers says it is 30 to 45 days away from introducing a micropayments product that will be tied to prepaid consumer accounts and …

Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co., a Charleston, S.C.-based supermarket chain, today switched on an in-lane biometric payment system in four stores on the way to a planned rollout of the fingerprint authentication system to all 116 stores in the chain. The system, from San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, allows customers to …

The number of people buying goods online at prices below $2 has grown to some 10 million, up from 4 million nine months ago, according to a survey on micropayments whose results were released today. In the same nine months, the proportion of online buyers who bought content from more …

New processing technologies for so-called micropayments–transactions carrying a value under $5–have received a lot of attention in recent months as the number of sellers of online digital content expands and as the market for song downloads explodes, but some observers now question how far the market can grow. Startups like …

MusicRebellion.com Inc., which operates a 3-year-old Web site selling song downloads, is getting set to adopt an updated version of a micropayments system to help handle growing volume. The Web merchant, which has been using Peppercoin Inc.'s original processing system, introduced last year, says the micropayment method accounts for between …

In an ambitious effort to capture a share of the rapidly expanding markets for both digital content and goods at the point of sale, micropayments processor Peppercoin Inc. today is announcing a second generation of the payments model it introduced commercially only last December. Considerably revised, the Waltham, Mass.-based company's …

The volume of checks processed by the Federal Reserve dove nearly 6% in the first quarter, reflecting the impact of various electronic payment methods on the nation's usage of paper checks. According to the latest data released by the Fed, the number of checks it cleared in the first quarter …

The stunning success of such ventures as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music service, coupled with a huge, untapped potential in transactions, has many expert observers becoming more and more optimistic about the prospects for micropayment processing. That may bode well for recent startups such as BitPass Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., …

PayPal may be getting close to processing payments for online song downloads, but it's not likely to be moving more broadly into micropayments any time soon. The San Jose, Calif.-based payment-processing unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc. finished adding functionality to its system last month to handle song payments and …