Aaron Bills, in Transaction World Magazine, answers some basic questions regarding the use and characteristics of Purchase Cards to help sales executives better understand the market context and also provide some strategies to build a base of business-to-business and business-to-government merchants.

Rick Munarriz reports in the Motley Fool that since implementing Google Checkout on their site, TheFurniture.com is closing 8% to 12% of its sales through Google's platform. PayPal used to seal the deal on 8% to 10% of the site's transactions, but that has now been whittled away to just 3% to 4% of total sales.

Eric Pfanner, of the International Herald Tribune, reports in the New York Times that Congress passed legislation over the weekend that would make it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems for Internet betting. As a result, several online-gambling companies said Monday that they planned to stop doing business with customers in the United States — by far the largest market for Internet gambling.

The editors of Scientific American report on Pay by Touch:
"To make a purchase at a participating merchant, you first place a finger on a scanner, which reads the swirls, curls and whorls on your digit. Then you punch in your phone number on an adjacent keypad. You select the payment account, confirm the amount and you're done--no fiddling with pockets or wallets."

Paymentnews.com reports Visa USA's announcement that leading U.S. merchants continue to adopt the Visa No Signature Required Program, which waives the signature requirement for qualifying Visa transactions less than $25 across 17 merchant categories using existing magnetic stripe POS card acceptance terminals. The program, launched in April 2006, is designed to accelerate Visa acceptance and card usage at traditionally cash-intensive merchants.

The core ingredients required to launch an online store include a shopping cart, merchant account and payment gateway. MerchantAccountServices.org provides a checklist to guide web designers in their efforts to build a secure and customer-friendly ecommerce web site.

Gateway offerings from Authorize.net, Verisign, Plug 'n Pay, and LinkPoint are compared thoroughly at merchant-account-services.org.

For a good listing of the many fees that may be associated with your merchant account, we suggest you visit The Merchant Council's website.