Headlines:
Apple's iTunes Taking PayPal
Apple Computer Inc. is now accepting PayPal Inc. transactions for payments at its iTunes digital music store.
The agreement, announced Friday, gives PayPal, a unit of the San Jose online auction giant eBay Inc., a prominent customer outside the online auction market that currently accounts for 70% of the payment company's volume.
It also establishes a prominent online alternative to credit cards for micropayments, which are commonly defined as transactions of $2 or less. Many online merchants have complained that credit card interchange fee structures are too high for vendors to make a profit on inexpensive products, such as quarter-per-play online games.
The iTunes store, which Apple markets along with the iPod digital music player, charges 99 cents a download. It sidesteps the transaction fee issue by using software that aggregates payments - the flat base fee that card companies charge is applied only once for a single purchase of several songs, rather than per-song.
Other online merchants have tweaked their business models to generate larger credit card payments, often by selling access to their sites on a subscription basis or for an up-front fee.
PayPal announced last December that it had developed special micropayment rates for digital music providers. PayPal has recently started expanding beyond its role as an online auction payment system; in October it began running print ads to appeal to online merchants.
Though PayPal is popular online, it still has a lot of ground to cover to catch up to credit card issuers. PayPal says has 17.4 million active users worldwide - several million more than the online banking enrollment of any U.S. bank. However, according to The Nilson Report of Oxnard, Calif., there are 871 million credit cards in the United States alone.
TCF to Use Products from TWS
TCF Financial Corp. of Wayzata, Minn., plans to use two automated teller machine deposit management products from TWS Systems Inc.
The Clearwater, Fla., vendor announced its deal with TCF last week. The products, Alertmanager and Omega, are part of TWS' Imagecenter product suite. Alertmanager is a fraud prevention program, and Omega is an ATM deposit product that runs on Microsoft Corp.'s .NET Web services architecture.
