Shelley Plomske Mobile payments and social marketing are creating many new opportunities for small and mid-sized businesses. Here are some key points for merchants as these new technologies and techniques ramp up.This year will be unlike anything ever witnessed in the payments industry. Driven by the global economic crisis, the …

A common solution has been found that will ease EMV migration and permit compliance with the Durbin Amendment, but all networks must support the solution to realize its full benefits, says Terry Dooley. The key to an easier, more affordable, and less complex solution for EMV in the United States …

The slow death of paper checks showed up again in the latest quarterly statistics from NACHA, the regulatory body for the automated clearing house network. The ACH, which links virtually every financial institution in the country, allows banks and merchants to convert checks into electronic formats. But transaction volume on …

PayPal Inc. this week struck a deal that offers the San Jose, Calif.-based processor the potential to reach TV viewers in more than 80 million U.S. households. The deal, with San Francisco-based commerce-platform vendor Delivery Agent Inc., furthers PayPal’s recent push into the nascent market for so-called T-Commerce transactions, or …

Mobile-payments processor Square Inc. on Wednesday moved to fill a gap in its product lineup by introducing Square Market, an e-commerce service for small U.S. merchants. Square Market publishes a merchant’s Web pages at no charge, doesn’t charge for listings, and charges a straight 2.75% of the sale for a …

n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n Merchant pricing is 0.9% of the sale plus 30 cents, which Gonthier says is only about one-third the cost of a credit card or PayPal Inc. transaction.

A lawsuit brought earlier this month by the Federal Trade Commission against a telemarketer and its merchant processor should serve as a warning to independent sales organizations and other acquirers that they could be held responsible for their clients’ actions, according to a prominent payments attorney. “The FTC’s suit should …

Going on the offense for the second time in less than a month, Visa Inc. on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. seeking to prevent the world’s largest retailer from suing Visa over interchange. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is mulling a legal challenge to the bank card networks on …

Announcing details for its “Cash for Registers” program, which it introduced a month ago, PayPal said it will waive processing fees on volume up to $20,000 a month through Jan. 31. The program officially gets under way July 10, which means early-bird merchants could get more than six months’ worth …

While more and more consumers are using mobile devices to access e-commerce sites, few small merchants have made their sites easy to navigate and buy from, according to research released this week. Indeed, mobile optimization—making sure a site loads quickly and renders checkout forms that are easy to read and …