As part of an effort to push its mobile payment app as deeply into retail as possible, China-based Tencent Holdings has increased the size of its minority ownership of a shopping mall and logistics developer. “Tencent’s deepening ties with China South City Holdings could create...
FiveStars, a 3-year-old loyalty reward firm focused on small businesses, has raised $26 million. “Menlo Ventures led the Series B investment, joined by the company’s earlier backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, DCM and Rogers Communications,” the Wall Street Journal reported. FiveStars has about 150 full-time and...
Online retailers are worrying less about infrastructure and more about marketing and customer service for the 2014 holiday season, according to a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. ecommerce professionals by eBay Enterprise. The 2014 Holiday Retail Audit found that retailers are beefing up spending...
After the Home Depot breach of some 56 million pieces of card data, it was only a matter of time before it would deliver the fraudulent purchases that fund such an attack. That time has now arrived with bad purchases now “rippling across financial institutions...
In the U.S., Costco is one of those extremely rare retailers who accepts American Express and does not accept either Visa or MasterCard. That exclusive club just got more exclusive, as Costco Canada abruptly severed its relationship with Amex. “The credit card relationship between American...
There’s little debate that Apple Pay is going to sharply boost mobile payment security. After all, replacing signature or a 4-digit shoulder-surfing-vulnerable PIN with a biometric authentication is a big step in the right direction. No authentication system is perfect, but being more secure than...
Amex is pushing a two-day event looking at creative ways e-tailers have successfully entered physical retail The idea of Onlines Day Off “was created to connect our small merchant partners to seasoned entrepreneurs and industry experts who can help them successfully navigate a changing business...
On the one hand, Apple and PayPal have been partners for almost a decade, notes ReadWrite, going all of the way to the early iTunes Music Store days. But given that PayPal has been actively pushing its own mobile payment app as a retail in-store...
To a degree that would likely shock an outsider, the payments industry loves a thrill. The industry’s favorite adjective is “disruptive” and an invisible disruption is, well, intuitively something that sounds objectively impossible—like a round square. Why such an atmosphere would attract innovative and revolutionary...
