Payments Basics: Understanding Electronic Commerce

Recently, I completed a webinar series with the Microsoft ISV Innovation team.  The goal was simple, and ridiculously ambitious, to provide a useful overview of the payments industry to software companies in 1 hour.  As you can imagine the material that “should” be covered can span several days. . .It was an interesting exercise in picking/choosing what is most important about the industry.

I have uploaded the slides to slideshare (embedded after the jump), or you can obtain a copy at:

A web presentation is only useful when those in attendance find the material engaging or useful.  A few quotes from the folk who have attended are:

Rich content understandably presented. Great basic primer.

Tyler did a great job with a rather dry subject.  Very engaging.

Before you download the content, or watch the recording of the session, there is one point that I want to make clear.

The term “Electronic Commerce”, to many, has come to mean eCommerce.  This flow typically feels like ordering from a website and having hte product delivered (either digitally or physically) following the purchase.  However, the prevalence of broadband connectivity has enabled a variety of commerce-enabled workflows that are not web specific.  Rather, the Internet becomes the infrastructure by which payments transactions can be initiated.  Electronic commerce doesn’t refer to a specific user experience. . .it is about integration into the workflow of the business.  This can be traditional point-of-sale (POS), applications tailored to the business need, integrations into accounting applications, and website payment acceptance.

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me. . .I am happy to talk about the subject in painful levels of detail.

What’s your perspective? Agree? Disagree? Anything to add? Critiques?
The comment form is below. . .

July 7, 2008

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

918kiss