A comparison-shopping application that works on mobile phones will soon tie into PayPal Inc.'s payment platform, blurring the distinction between online commerce and brick-and-mortar retailing and setting the stage for potentially big transaction volumes. Alexander Muse, co-founder of Dallas-based Big in Japan Inc., says he expects his company's ShopSavvy app …

American Express Co. turned up the competitive heat in the gift card sector Wednesday by announcing the immediate elimination of monthly fees on all of its gift cards. AmEx also announced an expanded gift card program with shopping mall operator Simon Property Group Inc., the nation's largest public real-estate company …

Internet bill payments were the lone stars of electronic checks in the first quarter, a quarter that saw volumes on all other e-check applications either decline or barely rise from fourth-quarter 2008 levels. Most e-check codes also declined on a year-over-year basis, according to the latest automated clearing house volume …

It's no surprise, but it's still significant: retail electronic-commerce sales declined by more than 5% in the fourth quarter, the U.S. Commerce Department's Census Bureau reported this week. “This is the first-ever quarterly decline year over year,” a Census Bureau spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. The bureau began tracking e-commerce …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday slashed the pricing it imposes on its prepaid Visa card, cutting the activation fee by nearly two-thirds, the reload fee by 35%, and the monthly maintenance charge by 39%. Since it rolled out its MoneyCard in June 2007, Wal-Mart has sold 2 million of the …

Internet bill payments were the star performers among the established electronic-check payment options during the fourth quarter, according to figures released Wednesday by the governing body of the automated clearing house. NACHA reports that transaction volume on its WEB e-check code, the code for online transactions such as bill payments, …

With the recession throwing more and more people out of work by the day, payments processors are reporting that their merchants are experiencing sharp increases in e-commerce chargebacks stemming from so-called friendly fraud. This is the fraud that results when a consumer repudiates a transaction as unauthorized in hopes of …

The latest credit card charge-volume figures from the nation's top three banks show big declines, portending weak results when other issuers, merchant acquirers, and Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. report their fourth-quarter earnings in coming days. On Friday, Bank of America Corp. reported fourth-quarter purchase volume of $56.6 billion on …

Closed-loop gift cards are not the new kids on the block any more, but some retailers in 2008's holiday shopping season found ways to wring more usage out of their cards despite the faltering economy and bad press about gift cards. That's the word from a newly released market assessment …

This is the second installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 developments are likely to transform the payments business. Web 2.0 is still in its infancy, and skeptics about its business models abound. Meanwhile, most online merchants are still scrambling to shore up and extend their current Web …