Industrial E-Payment Systems and Solutions

As e-commerce over the Internet is taking off, online payment (or e-payment) has become an essential piece of the e-commerce puzzle. To support e-commerce, a variety of industrial e-payment systems and solutions have been developed and deployed in many countries. These e-payment systems and solutions enable transactions for people to trade goods or services for money. It is not our desire to cover the entire e-payment industry in a single chapter. Rather, we prefer to select a few e-payment solutions and introduce them to the readers as real-life e-payment examples, or, to some extent, as e-payment case studies. In this chapter, we select three e-payment solutions for discussion, including Visa Cash, iPIN, and PayPal. For each of them, we describe design goals, features, functions, and security mechanisms. In addition, in the appendices of the chapter, based on the available information, we selectively present the architecture of these payment systems.