Ecommerce Merchants Embracing Alternative Payment Methods

[mandy]

Some of the largest e-commerce chains have suddenly started to embrace nontraditional payment methods, with one analyst group finding a 267 percent increase in such acceptance in four months...

Statistics, though, can be misleading, especially when the initial numbers are small. Although a 267 percent increase sounds like a landslide of nontraditional payment support, the survey also found that only 24 percent of the tracked sites offered any alternative payment.

With 76 percent of sites supporting only traditional credit or debit cards such as those from MasterCard, Visa and American Express, the survey results do not suggest that consumers can take advantage of e-commerce with no credit cards yet. Given that large retail chains are notoriously slow to accept fundamental changes, this is still a very significant development...

full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2113864,00.asp