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www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/product_reviews/article.php/397141
By Alexis Gutzman June 19, 2000 If you are a merchant whose customers in the brick-and-mortar world would normally pay with cash, then you need InternetCashTM and you need it now. InternetCashTM is the closest thing to cash there is online. It''s the perfect currency for teens and children - and for gifts. It''s also perfect for people who don''t have credit cards (~31% of the U.S. population and most of the rest of the world), or who would rather not pay with credit cards on the Web.
How It Works Customers then go to the InternetCashTM site, and activate their cards by entering a 20-digit code from the back of the card and creating a personal identification number. (Customers can choose whether to accept an encrypted cookie with the card number on it - strictly a convenience for the customer - or not.) Once the customer has activated the card, he can go to any of a number of merchants to spend his money, and all of them can be reached from the InternetCashTM site - this makes the InternetCashTM site an excellent referrer of customers who are ready to spend money, because they''ve already got it in an account on the InternetCashTM site. While they''re not currently passing the value in customer accounts through to merchants, they tell me they''d consider it so that merchants can show products that fall within that range when the customer clicks through from your site. When the customer is ready to check out with the merchant, he selects the payment method of InternetCashTM. A secure window that''s hosted by InternetCashTM appears asking him to select the card number from a drop-down list (if he''s got multiple cards and he has accepted the secure cookie) or to enter the card number (if he opted not to take the cookie), and to enter his pin. Purchases are automatically deducted from the value of the card, and a customer can pay with up to 30 cards. Within the next month, customers will be able to transfer value from one card to another so that they can consolidate the value of cards when they''re validating them, rather than paying with multiple cards. At that time, C2C commerce will be enabled because customers will be able to transfer their balances to other customers'' cards. Once the merchant receives verification from InternetCashTM that the payment was made successfully, which takes place behind the scenes with an API that runs on the merchant''s server, the merchant gives the customer an order confirmation number and the sale is concluded. The merchant stores only an encrypted digital signature from the customer and a payment authorization number from InternetCashTM. Consequently, there''s nothing in the merchant''s database that''s of value to hackers or that presents a risk for customers. If the customer is purchasing digital goods, he doesn''t even need to provide a name or address, just the payment information. In certain immediate fulfillment industries, the ones that have been targeted as high risk by Visa and Mastercard, this can really expedite the checkout process and insure anonymity on the part of the shopper. Merchants can accept InternetCashTM by adding the InternetCashTM option to their checkout tunnel. If a customer selects InternetCash, the merchant sends purchase information to InternetCash via the Web. This causes the secure InternetCashTM payment window to open and accept the customer''s card(s) and pin and create a digital signature of the purchase. The merchant then verifies the payment data and submits through an API a payment request to InternetCashTM for real time processing. When InternetCashTM has verified that the customer has the right to use that account (by verifying the pin), it transfers the money in real time to the merchant''s account, and sends a payment authorization number to the merchant - through the API. Because of the requirement of a pin, repudiation on the part of the customer (denying later that he made the purchase) becomes a non-issue. Customers can take up any customer service issues directly with the merchant, escalating them to InternetCashTM only if they don''t get satisfaction from the merchant. The merchant is not automatically assumed to be in the wrong, as with traditional credit cards, and all communications are digitally signed, so chargebacks are a much smaller issue. InternetCashTM will reimburse the customers (and penalize the merchants) if the merchant fails to deliver the goods as promised. In the immediate future, InternetCashTM will be localizing its site into Spanish for the domestic Latino market. InternetCashTM has already been integrated into some Commerce Service Provider''s solutions (CSPs) and several commercial shopping cart packages, including Microsoft''s Site Server Commerce 3.0, IBM''s Net.Commerce 3.x, Intershop 4, StoreFront 2000, Mercantec''s SoftCart 5, Make-a-Store, Smith-Micro''s WebCatalog, and will soon be available in MIVA''s Miva Merchant 2 and Pandesic. CSP''s who have integrated the solution include Americart, Plug ''n Pay, HipHip''s Merchandizer, and will soon include FreeMerchant. Because of the integration into these solutions, SunGlassHut was able to begin accepting payments with InternetCashTM within 24 hours of when they signed up. The InternetCashTM solution is not yet WAP-compliant, and does not work in any other currencies. While InternetCashTM had originally intended to serve the market of people who prefer to pay in cash, the realities of online commerce have required them to start selling their cards online, with payment by credit card. In the future, the value of cards can also be augmented online with credit card payment.
Fees, Costs, Etc. Customers do not pay a premium to use InternetCashTM, but when C2C commerce is enabled, the payer will pay a small fee to transfer money to the recipient.
Overall Pros: Convenient for teens and youth who don''t have access to credit cards. Secure and private for everyone. Merchants get their money quickly and chargebacks are mitigated to a large degree by the requirement of a pin. Cons: Only available in U.S. dollars for now. Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. Her newest book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital will be out in October. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com |
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