Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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Having to enter credit card details into online forms on e-commerce sites involves always security risks. Now the three big card giants Visa, MasterCard and American Express plan to get rid of those numbers all together, at least for online customers. Instead of the numbers digital tokens would be processed, making payments more secure. Currently a framework and standard is being developed.
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Meanwhile, mobile payments are finding increasing acceptance among online shoppers. According to global payments solution specialist Adyen, mobile-payment transactions have increased by 27 percent worldwide from May to August. And iOS devices accounted for nearly 3 out of 4 mobile transactions.
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Amazon is trying to compete with PayPal in getting online retailers to implement a button that allows their customers to pay for goods with Amazon. The “Login and Pay” button works similar to the ubiquitous PayPal buttons, making use of previously stored customer and payment details at Amazon. For retailers, the transaction fees are 2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction or less, based on volume.
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The Seattle-based discount e-commerce site Zulily is the first deal site to go public since Groupon. It aims to generate about $100 million with the IPO.
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The famous US blog and journalism portal The Huffington Post, one of the first blog sites that became a big media entity, has launched a German version. As in its mother land, huffingtonpost.de will offer a mix of news written by professional journalists and of opinion pieces and blog posts by independent and community authors.
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Some people don’t want to blog. Other would like to but don’t really know how to start. And especially, where to start. Digital Trends has compiled a nice overview about the best free, freemium and premium blog services, describing who they are optimized for and what to expect.