Credit Cards Online Information

E-commerce, the sale of goods and services online, is expected to pass the $20 billion mark next year as more merchants adapt to the relatively new technology and consumers overcome fears of being defrauded.

Those fears - that hackers will hijack credit-card numbers out of cyberspace - have been well-publicized. But an equally thorny problem, and one that has gotten less attention, is finding ways to make it simpler for merchants to do business over the Internet.

"Right now, someone places an online order and it takes us about 15 minutes to process it, from approving credit cards to filling out invoices," said Warwick Stone, senior creative director at Los Angeles-based Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, which sells merchandise and offers hotel bookings online.

"So far, online purchases are automated on the screen for the buyer, but for us there's still a lot of legwork," Stone said.

Enter Pasadena-based Earthlink Network Inc. The company introduced a pilot e-commerce program this month that promises to give companies the means to verify credit-card purchases more quickly and easily than they can using current technology.

The Earthlink program has two main attractions - it provides instant online verification of credit and a state-of-the-art encryption program to ease the fears of wary buyers.

Hard Rock Hotel is one of the four companies chosen by Earthlink to participate in the pilot program. The others are Shell Lubricants (a division of Shell Oil Co.), Surfer Magazine and Goldmine Software Corp., representing a cross-sampling of products and business models.

"We've already had a strong response from companies trying to get into the pilot program," said Bill Greene, director of corporate sales at Earthlink. "We hope to open it to a few thousand merchants in 1998 and grow from there."

Earthlink's program is elbowing its way into an increasingly crowded field. Countless software companies have launched or are scrambling to launch e-commerce packages that offer a variety of features.

Among them is "Intershop Online," the San Francisco's Intershop Co.'s software package that will be one of Earthlink's more direct competitors similarly claims to be a comprehensive e-commerce solution. Its selling point is advanced database organization of online sales.

# posted by Medical Information : 5:26 AM