Payment systems for e-commerce

When I first started in the e-commerce area, I had to quickly learn about banking terms and technologies. Unfortunately, there wasn't any ready reference. Now there are plenty of places to go to learn more about payment processing and merchant accounts. Although many of the following list of links are specific to their particular programs, they offer good introductory material for getting started in this rather arcane area.

• Yahoo's help screens for opening a merchant account,
• PSIweb's checklist for how to set up CyberCash and Verisign products,
• HotWired/WebMonkey's e-commerce tutorial covers lots of the basics and shows you how they set up a sample site with Cold Fusion,
• Shopping cart software and services directory from Poor Richard's Web Site is a very extensive list (with prices!) of shopping cart and payment processing software, services, and products,
• Glossary of payment terms from Anne & Lynn Wheeler, Internet banking consultants, and
• iHTML Merchant's list of payment processors, a good place to find out more about different vendors and also see an online demo of one of the lower-cost storefront technologies.

Payment providers and technologies
A wide variety of choices exist for implementing Internet payment processing on Web storefronts. Here is a scorecard with links to the various vendors.

One-click providers

• Cha! Technologies Services Inc.'s 1ClickCharge
• qPass Inc.
• iPin
• Trivnet Inc.
• eCHARGE Corp.

• EntryPoint Inc.
• The Brodia Group
• IBM Corp.'s Consumer Wallet
• Citigroup's CitiWallet
• Yodlee.com
• Microsoft Corp.'s Passport

• ShopNow.com Inc.
• eBates.com
• iGive.com

• InstaBuy for one-click
• Tellan Software Inc.'s Web/PC/MacAuthorize for POS gateways
• ICVerify for POS gateways

• The ECML Alliance
• Globeset Inc.'s explanation of secure electronic transaction, SET
• SET Secure Electronic Transaction LLC's site