Online payments

Target Corp. agreed to purchase grocery-delivery startup Shipt Inc. for $550 million, stepping up efforts to challenge Amazon.com Inc. in e-commerce orders.

Payment Rails is putting a tight focus on the emerging area of “influencer marketing,” where global brands are spreading money among individuals who use social media to promote products.

Establishing trust, especially when it comes to online payments, is critical. People need to feel secure and confident that their personal boundaries won’t be crossed or their information misused, writes Rik van't Hof, director of product management front-end for Ingenico e-commerce.

Apple Pay Cash is chasing peer transfer share in a maturing market, going up against long-established services like Venmo, Square Cash and the bank-powered Zelle.

In a world where consumers are tuning out TV ads easier than ever before with streaming services like Netflix, the e-commerce giant is giving advertisers a new platform to be in front of millions of people who like to shop, writes Tom Caporaso, CEO of Clarus Commerce.

The deal will help First Data compete in the fast-growing "integrated payments" space as payment processors race to diversify products, markets and technology.

Installment payments for e-commerce purchases are starting to take hold in North America as an alternative to standard credit cards, and PayBright is seeking a niche in Canada.

Digital payment brands like Venmo are achieving scale quickly by recognizing that no one wakes up thinking they need to make a transaction. They really focus more on what they have to pay for, according to CO-OP Financial Services' Shazia Manus.

Venmo achieved its status by designing its interface like that of a social network. PayPal's version of that comes from Facebook.

Neither the acquirer processing the payment, nor relevant regulatory bodies ever know that these payments are actually for illicit goods, making transaction laundering particularly dangerous and far-reaching, writes Ron Teicher, CEO of EverCompliant.

With the holiday shopping season, there is an inevitable dark side — an increase in transactions means an increase in fraud. This is to some extent the cost of doing business; fraud will always be a percentage of overall transaction volume.

As any stressed-out parent knows, kids can be quite bad at communicating what they need for school. Bursari has added a software development kit to improve its ability to accept and process one-time and recurring payments to schools through a variety of means.

Black Friday is making headway with bargain-hunting U.K. consumers, but their 3 billion pounds ($4 billion) in spending is doing nothing to help Britain’s troubled retail centers.

Antiquated testing strategies result in code being deployed with a variety of vulnerabilities and bugs, which is especially dangerous given the current payment landscape of expanding endpoints, consumer devices and payment apps, writes Mark Medlin, chief technology officer of Paragon Application Systems.

The main spark for Azimo’s transaction growth in far-flung geographic regions came from its commitment to social media beginning four years ago.

Cryptocurrency could be a strong fit for online games, which often develop their own realistic economies despite being cut off from mainstream currencies.

Do the Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail holidays still have meaning in a world where sales promotions are perennial and e-commerce is embedded in nearly every form of digital communication? According to data, they do, and more now than ever.

Widespread data breaches have sparked a rise in account-takeover fraud using stolen consumer credentials, prompting merchants to crack down on suspicious purchases. But too many legitimate customers are getting caught in the process.

BigCommerce has added PayPal Credit as a payment option for merchants using its e-commerce platform.

By employing a multilayered approach to mobile security that combines device authentication with the latest user identification measures, retailers can establish maximum trust not only with their users, but also in the device being used to transact with them, writes Michael Lynch, chief strategy officer for InAuth.