Digital Commerce and Payment Systems

Payments as a service (PaaS) is a phrase used to describe a SaaS-based methodology used to connect a disparate group of international payment systems. The architecture is represented by a layer – or overlay – that resides on top of these disparate systems and provides for two-way communications between the payment system and the PaaS. Communication is governed by standard APIs created by the PaaS provider.

Non-store retailing, sometimes also labelled ‘home shopping’ is consistently achieving double-digit growth, and slowly taking a bigger share of overall retailing.

A charge card is similar to a credit card, except that the cardholder is required to pay the full balance of the statement amount, which is usually monthly. It is a means of obtaining a very short term loan for a purchase. The period of the loan is the period between the purchase and the statement date plus the period that the cardholder has to pay the account,a potential period of usually up to 55 days.

An online wallet is a program or web service that allows users to store and control their online shopping information, like logins, passwords, shipping address and credit card details, in one central place.

The main function of the dialog system of automated online assistants is to translate the human-generated input into a digital format that the automated online assistant can use for further processing by its expert system, as well as interpret whatever solutions or replies it generates back to what a human user understands, and optimally in a way as natural and user-friendly as possible.

Bricks and clicks is a business model by which a company integrates both offline (bricks) and online (clicks) presences, sometimes with the third extra flips (physical catalogs). Additionally, many will also offer telephone ordering as well, or at least provide telephone sales support.

Wire transfer is a method of electronic funds transfer from one person or institution (entity) to another. A wire transfer can be made from one bank account to another bank account or through a transfer of cash at a cash office, such as Western Union.

When pulling POP3 email messages from a server, a client can make regular pull requests every few minutes. Hence, it uses the pull technology.

Business-to-business (B2B) describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. The company began in 1999 with the web domain Alibaba.com a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers.

A virtual economy (or sometimes synthetic economy) is an emergent economy existing in a virtual persistent world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an Internet game. People enter these virtual economies for recreation and entertainment rather than necessity,

A client media player can begin playing the data (such as a movie) before the entire file has been transmitted.

Freemium is a business model by which a proprietary product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for advanced features, functionality, or virtual goods. The word freemium is a portmanteau neologism combining the two aspects of the business model: free and premium.

Single sign-on (SSO) is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them. Conversely, Single sign-off is the property whereby a single action of signing out terminates access to multiple software systems.