Online payments

Amazon's increasingly weird ideas for getting products to Prime customers — grocery delivery, in-home delivery and now in-car delivery — point to an unsettling conclusion: Amazon, for all its market dominance, is pushing the limits of who it can reach with traditional package delivery.

The $219 million deal will expand RealPage's geographic and digital footprint in a market that still relies on paper-based payments.

It's too soon to tell whether a new button would replace Visa Checkout and Masterpass as brands. It's also unclear why consumers would choose another new payment option over the many options available today — such as PayPal.

Mobile payments provider iZettle is adding an e-commerce platform that will expand merchants' capabilities to accept payments in-store and online.

This update will be an immense help to the broader payments industry in the ongoing adoption of cloud computing by organizations subject to PCI compliance obligations, writes Dan Stocker, practice director of commercial services for cloud and technology at Coalfire.

E-commerce payments technology provider Stripe is launching a fraud prevention tool for security professionals at large organizations.

Though financial institutions with online bill payment services still command the largest share of the bill payment market, it’s a category with many friction points ripe for disruption.

ATMs require dual-factor authentication in the form of a physical card and a PIN, and this same concept should be extended to phone transactions, writes Patrick Cox, CEO of TRUSTID.

The Middle East presents a rare opportunity for digital payment innovators to access a populous and high-spending region with good levels of connectivity, writes Tom MacDonald, financial and business services practice head for Global Growth Markets.

In seeking to solidify that potential, FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium have created Web Authentication (WebAuthn), a new standard that allows approved FIDO Authentication methods to operate through browsers.

Brand and access to capital can suffer if companies don't take proper care of data from payments and other online activities, according to David Thomas, CEO of Evident ID.

More e-commerce companies see recurring billing as a key revenue model, a trend that convinced Stripe to try to lower the bar to entry.

Midigator, which markets software to help e-commerce merchants manage payment card chargebacks, has received $30 million in funding from private equity firm LLR Partners to further develop the product.

Braintree's newest offering is designed to make e-commerce partnerships easier — at least, from a technology perspective.

With smaller screen sizes and increased levels of distractions ranging from a text or a notification, pitfalls in the checkout process can result in more abandoned carts than successful transactions, writes Andre Lyver, director of engineering for financial services at Shopify.

China's declaration on Wednesday that its payments market is now open to foreign companies gives Chinese payments processors an opportunity to grow globally — but it's made similar moves before, with little effect.

Alipay already has inroads in Mexico, where its mobile wallet is accepted at some retailers popular with Chinese tourists. Through a partnership with Openpay, it’s expanding Mexican merchants’ access to these transactions in person and online.

Google has rolled out a new program for merchants to help them battle Amazon’s dominance by routing consumers’ product searches across various channels and devices into a single Google-hosted checkout.

Not all of the people driving this trend are honest about it. But there is a less nefarious use for browser-based mining as a potential revenue stream to support digital content.

It's hard to build an online marketplace when the same products can be found just as easily on Amazon and eBay. But Reverb has found success in fine-tuning the way it handles data and payments.