CyberCash is not alone in its quest to support electronic payments. The increasingly crowded market includes such players as Netscape, Open Market, CheckFree Corp., DigiCash Inc., First Virtual Holdings Inc., The NetBill project at Carnegie Mellon University's Information Networking Institute and VeriFone Inc., all of which are partnering with retailers and banks to create secure digital payment options. Still, old habits die hard. Experts believe that credit card payments which already are familiar to users will fare best in Internet retailing. A nother bright spot is that cheaper, easier Internet access is boosting the numbers and variety of users online.
Lower prices address only half of the consumer access problem.
Anyone who's tried to log on to a Web shopping mall with a modem knows the onus of waiting endless minutes for graphics to load. Theoretically, cable TV Internet access could run roughly 350 times faster than a 28,800-bps modem connection. Officials from the two firms declined to say how many subscribers they expect to sign up, but just the thought of wider Internet pipes delights some retailers. So I expect to see increased accesses as well as, hopefully, increased purchases. Once the bandwidth gets better, J.C. Penney will be more likely to incorporate new technologies such as Java, Shockwave and virtual reality modeling language that will create a more exciting environment, she says.