Cashing In On The Internet

DataCash has emerged as a business dedicated to handling payments over the Internet; its service integrating with Microsoft's electronic commerce architecture.

It is several years since the larger Post Offices in Britain adopted SQMS (Single Queue, Multiple Server) as a mathematically superior technique for minimising the time that customers have to wait to be served. Department stores and supermarkets have been slower to follow suit, however, and it is still very unusual to find this approach to customer service taken up in practice by the retail sector.

In its own way, that reluctance on the part of retailers to reduce delays - often exacerbated by customers' credit cards being authorised over a heavily-overloaded telecoms network at busy periods will prove to be one of the drivers for stimulating the growth of purchasing over the Internet. But before that additional demand can be realised, however, merchants have to be confident that there is a safe and reliable route by