Rivals of Paypal such as Yahoo or Microsoft still don't have any real weight in online person-to-person payment systems in front of this eBay company. Other rivals such Beenz.com have simply left the P2P market.

However, some "big" players remain attentive and think that there is still place for them in this market, such as VeriSign which have bought CyberCash, or L4 which just raised up $23 million and bank on a future market of $400 billion aimed at Web surfers who have still not bought online or do not want to use their credit card online.

About the usage of credit cards online, if 95% of online transactions are made via a credit card, against 35% in offline sales, it doesn't mean that it is because surfers are pleased to use their credit cards online, but just that there are often no other payments possibilities.

Let's see the problem for companies.

It is evident that a company cannot give a bank credit card to any of its employees. But some of them often need, for professional reasons, to buy products or services online. In that case, procedures are much heavier that one could think for these employees.

One can see, through this simple case, that the online payment problem is today far from being resolved... without speaking of fraud problems for cyber merchants.

Then, alternative payment systems to credit cards have still nice days in front of them if... Paypal don't monopolize the market, colouring it a little too much at its own eBay colours.

It's certainly to early to imagine what will be the future of online payments, but what is sure is that the surfer's keyboard equipped with a chip card reader, will remain a myth and that solution will come from systems as Paypal's or from the most active and widely established banking groups such as Visa or MasterCard.

Source : eCommerce Times