With the holiday season weeks away, more major retailers are now offering so-called virtual gift cards. But few make the experience of buying, sending, and redeeming the digital payment products easy or pleasant, according to a report issued this week. Some 59 of the 100 largest online merchants, ranked …

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  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. will pilot its latest move to the point of sale with an undisclosed merchant this quarter, add more merchants early in 2012, and establish merchant pricing for the service over the next three to six months, eBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe told stock analysts on Wednesday. …

  Many community bankers say their payment revenues are declining, and they are bracing for hits from higher expenses from complying with regulations and from fraud while at the same time trying to ramp up new services such as mobile payments. The findings come from the Independent Community Bankers of …

The unceasing controversy over the Durbin Amendment and its debit card interchange price controls continued Wednesday when two members of Congress declared they would introduce legislation to repeal the measure. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives might very well pass the bipartisan proposal, but its survival chances are much lower in …

  n To use PayPal Access, a site must sign up for a PayPal account but is not obliged to accept PayPal. The new system then gives the site access to some 100 million active PayPal users, who can control how much information they want to share. If a user …

  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 …

Apriva Inc., a major processor of payment transactions from vending machines, this week told machine owners that it is working to assure their card-acceptance costs will remain stable despite the uncertain status of a program it has with Visa Inc. that gives them an interchange break if they install hardware …

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