Trusting the Internet with our credit cards is the biggest obstacle to online shopping. To inspire consumer confidence, OzEmail has unveiled an e-commerce platform that alleviates the need to submit credit card details when transacting online.
The catch, however, is that to use the OzEpay service you must be an OzEmail subscriber and to be one you have to have a credit card.
Once those finer details are taken care of online transactions are simply billed to your OzEmail acccount.
"OzEpay leverages the fact that we already have all OzEmail customers' credit card details," OzEmail CEO Justine Milne said.
A customer's credit card information is currently stored in a secure billing engine, "no credit card details go over the Internet at all," according to Milne.
Coy on divulging subscriber numbers, OzEmail claims to have somewhere in the region of 400,000 and 500,000.
However, the Internet Service Provider would not say what subscriber uptake of OzEpay needed to be, nor how many new subscribers were required, before it would see a return on its AU$1 million investment into the venture.
"We expect uptake to be slow to start with," Milne conceded, adding that he hoped OzEpay "would be a driver of subscribers for OzEmail".
However, there's no "cut off date" to see a return in investment, Milne said.
OzEmail subscribers can transact at participating merchant sites -- of which there are currently just ten, including Roses Only and ChaosMusic.
To use the service, a customer must click on the OzEpay logo at a participating site when it comes to payment, confirm delivery address details, then enter a six-figure PIN.
OzEpay goes through the usual bank credit checks to ensure there is sufficient money to process the transaction and customers receive a unique transaction identification number once the purchase is processed.
With 86 percent of Internet users concerned about personal data privacy, OzEmail claims it won't on-sell OzEpay users' personal information to merchants.
"We have a stringent privacy policy," Milne said. "We don't collect a whole pile of details on customers," he added.
It's estimated that four percent of purchases in the Australian retail space will take place online by 2004 -- racking up to around AU$9 million -- and OzEmail said it wants a bite of that pie.
However, Milne wouldn't disclose the cost to merchants, saying only that it dealt with them on an individual basis and costs were only to cover credit card merchant fees.
I know I'm a bit late but I've only just seen this news item. It is envisiged that OzEpay will take three years before any profit is seen. This is due to the high development costs, machine and software expenses are extra. It uses Oracle8i under the MCI corporate license - I wonder if Yahoo will now be picking up the bill? I think three years is being very optimistic in seeing a return, it will be more like 5. At the time of going live the whole database could be extracted to a flat file and zipped up on to a floppy disk.