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A growing amount of economic activity is taking place on the Internet (Weiner, 1999). As a result, electronic payment displays a boom although paper based payment methods dominate the payment systems in the U.S. economy. So what is Electronic Payment? Electronic Payment refers to financial transactions that are made without the use of paper documents such as cheques or notes (“A consumer’s guide of electronic payments”, 2001). Recently, there are many different e-payment methods emerging on the web. Facing a wide variety of options, consumers are confused about which one is the best. I believe that the best e-payment must have a stable and secure environment offering protection to the consumer. After comparing three e-payment systems, I have discovered every system has advantages and disadvantages. But, in general, I think credit/debit card online payment is the best system in E-Business currently. In this essay, I will introduce three categories of e-payments and their working processes, and also analyse the advantages and disadvantages of each systems. First of all is the credit/debit card on-line payment. The second one is personal on-line payment and the last one is E-money. This essay can help to illustrate why I believe the credit/debit card is the best system in E-Business. This research is based on the America E-Business environment because of its most popular use of the Internet. First of all, I would like to introduce the first type of e-payment instrument-Credit/Debit card online payment. Their boom has contributed to the huge point of sales (POS) and automatic teller machine (ATM) networks (Feiler, 1999.p.4). Because of the nature of electronic information transaction, credit/debit card became the preliminary e-payment tools when web-business emerged on the Internet. In fact, an estimated, 15 billion transactions (82% of volume) worth $1,235 billion (87% of value) were operated on the web in the U.S. in 2000 (Sienkiewicz and Bochicchio, 2002, p.6). Now let us look how the credit/debit card works on the web. Normally each web merchant has his own credit/debit clearing service agency whose computers connect with every card issued by banks and financial companies. When purchasers place an order, they must offer information of their card such as card number, expiry date and name of cardholder. After formatting the transaction detail appropriately, the agency sends this information to the issuing bank to request transaction authorization. Finally, the issuing bank approves the transfer of money to acquiring bank who in turn, credits the merchant's account (“How It Works - Credit Card Processing”, 2003).
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