Payment Options

On Monday, Costco took the final step in severing its 17-year relationship with American Express and began exclusively accepting Visa for credit card purchases at its stores. For more than 11 million customers, the switch meant cutting up their Costco-branded American Express cards and swapping them for a new Visa card issued by Citigroup. A transition…

Learn more about why Apple Pay becoming available on the web is a potential game changer for online retailers; what Staples is doing to compete in today's instant gratification economy; and an unintended consequence for retailers’ generous return policies — lower pay for store associates.

Commerce as we knew it only a few short years ago has come and gone, and its newest forms are morphing dynamically. While brick-and-mortar stores still exist, their popularity is undoubtedly waning. Websites have lost ground to a seemingly endless number of mobile apps. However, many industry experts who previously predicted that mobile apps and…

As a retailer, you know there’s a wholesale cost to goods and a markup. The same is true for credit card processing. The wholesale cost is the portion of fees that go to the banks that issue credit cards and to the card brands themselves. These costs are non-negotiable — everyone has to pay at…

Just as this joke has no well-designed conclusion, the controversy around EMV conversion protocol seems like it will never end. And as fortune would have it, the three subjects in the title are at the heart of the most recent debate. Senator Dick Durbin, somewhat of a merchant ambassador on Capitol Hill, is once again…

If your launching a startup, free cash flow is almost certainly at a premium. Therefore, the last thing you want to do is spend more than you absolutely have to for transactional fees that don’t meaningfully contribute to growing your business (e.g., credit card processing fees). Thankfully, there are some pretty straightforward methods that your…

As your company expands its e-commerce efforts into international markets, understand that your global websites must do more than speak the language. You need financial fluency, too — i.e., a clear understanding of your new customers’ buying habits, particularly their preferred payment platforms. MotionPoint Corporation localizes e-commerce sites for retailers around the world. Based on…

Wal-Mart is suing Visa for allowing customers to verify chip-enabled debit card transactions with a signature instead of a PIN. The lawsuit filed Tuesday in New York Supreme Court says that Visa requires Wal-Mart to accept signature-based transactions for chip debit cards, which Wal-Mart says are a less secure method of payment than PIN-based payments and…

Many merchants and retail workers are watching their lives play in slow motion when they process credit cards. To combat fraudulent transactions, the retail industry is shifting away from the traditional magnetic stripe toward tiny computer chips embedded inside cards. The chip technology, known as E.M.V. (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa), has been around for…

If you're tired of how much longer checkout at a store is taking since the rollout of new chip-enabled credit and debit cards, relief may be on the way. Visa said on Tuesday it had upgraded its software to improve the processing of chip-enabled cards and reduce checkout times. The payments company said the upgrade will…