ReleaseWire Connect

By now, everyone knows December is the month of spending a lot of money on gifts. Throughout the years, billions of dollars have been sent on holiday shopping during the seasonal days. Of course, the payment methods have also been varying throughout the years. While it's immensely difficult to analyze this entire evolution, we can say with certainty that chip cards are dominating this year's holiday shopping.

Several years ago, marketing executives came up with a day that made many people go completely nuts for sales, discounts, and rebates. That day, of course, is called Black Friday. However, people thought that wasn't enough, for they needed one more day to satisfy their hunger for shopping without the struggle of fighting with thousands of angry buyers over a TV. That's when Cyber Monday was born, the day where every single item online gets a huge discount and we can all enjoy the pleasures of consumerism. However, eBay reckons this is not enough, so they've come up with a new day for customers to spend their salary: Mobile Wednesday.

When it comes to mobile wallets, there are two big companies that currently own a considerable chunk of the market: Samsung and Apple. While there are multiple alternatives available, these are the one's people tend to prefer. The company JP Morgan Chase & Co. is determined to change that, and their first step in doing so was to create a mobile wallet of their own: Chase Pay.

The Internet of Things, also known as IoT, is the network between household items that will come to represent an estimated $14 billion in revenue within the next four years for all those who decide to invest in it.

Wells Fargo is getting ready to release a mobile wallet app for Android devices. This addition to the app store is going to be very beneficial to both its users and for the bank.

Say goodbye to the problematic static password. Visa is announcing some drastic changes concerning the static password used with its Verified by Visa e-commerce fraud-control service. More specifically, the company plans to phase it out. Certainly, some big news that will affect their whole customer base. But Visa's intentions are a turn for the good. With the new system they are currently developing, they are sure to eliminate unwanted problems that the static password might bring to their customers, such as vulnerability towards a hacker's attack, chances of forgetting a password, and thus preventing from completing a transaction, and so on. Furthermore, in some Verified by Visa implementations, the enrollment process "can give thieves a way to register a password on a cardholder's behalf," a post issued by Visa itself says. Creating a Verified by Visa static password during the enrollment process also "can introduce friction and divert cardholders from the merchant's Web site," they add.

Every day that passes, reward cards become more and more common in the U.S. In fact, recent research has stated that 93% of all the credit card spending is done through some sort of a reward credit card. In general, people seem to enjoy this kind of payment method and will likely stick with it for a long time. And, although they can be considered helpful for card issuers and card holders, it is not always the case with merchants. Here´s why.

Consumers have now shown their preferences and they are clearer than ever: they prefer mobile and online transactions. And it should be no surprise, as these transactions are easier, faster and way more convenient. However, merchants don´t seem to display this comfort, as their conversion rates, well, they are just low. It´s not that consumer preferences are changing, not at all. This issue is all due to checkout abandonment, which is why merchants are continuously looking for ways to make sure their customers don´t abandon their purchase midway.