Google Checkout -- the Unofficial Blog

AliBaba to EachNet: Let's Have Free Auctions

ChinaTechNews has reported that Alibaba has invited eBay's China operation, eBay EachNet, to make its services free to users. OPW had reported earlier that AliBaba will be continuing its free auction offering for three more years with the goal of creating a 1 million entrepreneur strong community around their service.

Taobao to be Free of Charge for Three More Years

Alibaba.com announced today that its Taobao.com Chinese-language consumer auction site will remain free for buyers and sellers for three more years, until at least October, 2008.

In addition, Alibaba will invest US $120 million to further grow Taobao.com's trusted e-commerce marketplace with the goal of creating one million jobs for entrepreneurs in China.

Some days ago Online Payment Watch highlighted an article about AliBaba's dominance in China and how it has gained market share from eBay's EachNet.

627 Million People Have Shopped Online

According to a study by ACNielsen about 10% of the world's population has shopped online. On top of the list is Germany, Austria, and the UK with over 95% shopping penetration. The US ranked 11th at 89% penetration.

Link: International Herald Tribune.

VeriSign Buys Moreover Technologies for $30M

The purchase would complement VeriSign's Weblogs.com purchase. Weblogs.com keeps tracks on updates made on Weblogs using a system of pings or notifications. Moreover will enable the company to process those Pings, provide meta data, and enable it to aggreagate information coming from various weblog sources.

Link: Red Herring

Payment Product Claims to Be Better than PayPal

Bellweather reports, a company that links investors to opportunities announced a teaser about an upcoming peer to peer payment product. According to the report the product will have a significantly lower fraud rate and will play in the niche market of large money transfers between bank accounts.

Link: MaketWire.

eBay Barricades Itself, Prepares for Google Offensive

In a defensive move against payments incumbent Google, eBay has recently changed its payment policy to include forbidding its users to use a new payment systemunless it is approved by the company itself. This does not include current non PayPal payment methods.

Read more about this move on eBay.

Pay By Touch Buys CardSystems

Pay By Touch, a San Francisco based biometrics company has acquired the troubled credit card processing company CardSystems. The move comes after a bidding war with Cybersource and other potential buyers.

Link: Red Herring.

Creating a Community Around Your Software

I recently ran through a site that sells Flash PayPal button generators. The maker says that using Flash instead of a normal HTML to create a payment button makes for a cool effect and hides the seller's email from email spam bots.

Yahoo Partner Alibaba Claims #1 Spot in Chinese Auction Market, Beats eBay's EachNet

Alibaba, the auction company in which Yahoo has a $1 billion investment, has said that it now owns 60% of the market share of the P2P auction space in China. The company says that it is getting about 1 million new customers every month.

Link: AuctionBytes.

Cox Communications Selects Intec Billing Solution

Cox Communications has selected Intec's billing solution. Ron Whited, MIS director at the company said that the main reasons behind the purchase were reduced costs as well as reporting tools that support his company's compliance wth regulations.

Link: SourceWire