From the WSJ:
June 12, 1999
Rivals Agree on a Standard
For Easing Web Purchases
By NICK WINGFIELD
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
Some of the Internet's fiercest competitors have agreed upon a single
standard for electronic wallets, a technology designed to simplify
purchases for online shoppers.
Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., America Online Inc. and
International Business Machines Corp., along with Visa USA Inc.,
MasterCard International and others, will Monday endorse a new
technical format called ECML, or electronic commerce modeling language.
Dell Computer Corp., Hollywood Entertainment Corp.'s Reel.com
subsidiary, Beyond.com Corp. and Nordstrom Inc. are among the online
merchants pledging to use ECML to accept credit-card payments.
Much as the hypertext markup language created a standard for the
presentation of all Web pages, ECML is designed to give Web merchants
a way to accept credit-card payments from consumers without requiring
them to renter their personal information during every transaction.
Software firms, for their part, will use ECML to store payment data in a
shopper's Web browser or on a server on the Internet.
The initiative follows years of unsuccessful efforts by technology
companies to gain broad support for rival electronic wallets. Merchants
largely shunned the wallets because they required purchasing special
software or reprogramming their sites to accept the various incompatible
formats.
"Unless you wanted to support all of them you had to place bets," said
Dave Rochlin, chief operating officer of Reel.com.
Some merchants like Amazon.com Inc. have been more successful with
credit-card wallets that work only on their own sites. Magdalena Yesil, a
venture capitalist who previously was an executive at CyberCash Inc., one
of the earliest developers of an electronic wallet, said high-tech and
Internet companies previously hoped to develop a tighter relationship with
consumers by promoting their own proprietary wallets. The lack of a
standard "had a lot to do with politics and market share," Ms. Yesil said. "I
don't think it was ever a technical issue."
The cooperation of Microsoft and its bitter rivals Sun and AOL shows
how much importance the companies are placing on wallet technology as a
catalyst for electronic commerce. Earlier this year a report by Jupiter
Communications LLC, a New York research firm, showed that 27% of
Internet shoppers abandon their orders before check out because of the
hassle of filling out forms with credit-card numbers and other data.
"Whether we're competitors or not, this gives us all a bigger pie," said
Blake Irving, general manager of Microsoft's consumer commerce group.
Some analysts believe the latest initiative may have a better chance of
succeeding than past technology. "ECML is a baby step, but at least the
baby is walking," said Paul Hagen, an analyst at Forrester Research in
Cambridge, Mass. |
