Visa and BBBOnLine, the online subsidiary of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, work together to build complementary programs that increase consumer confidence in e-commerce. One such effort, the BBBOnline Reliability seal program, helps identify you as a trustworthy business.

In response to consumers’ general wariness of online transactions, some online merchants have begun accepting and issuing alternative payment methods, such as electronic wallets and digital money/stored-value accounts.

eWallets are bits of software that are either server “side" (information that is stored on a secure server) or “client side" (information that is stored on the consumer’s personal computer). They can help merchants acquire and retain customers by offering an easy and convenient ordering solution: allowing payments and shipping information to be securely stored on a merchant’s site for repeat purchases.

Consumers can get eWallets from their financial institution, specialized merchants, or technology providers (e.g., Microsoft).

Cryptography is the process of scrambling and unscrambling information so that only the intended parties can read it. For example, when you make a purchase online, cryptography can prevent everyone but the intended merchant from reading your Visa account number and card expiration date.

With private key cryptography, data is encoded using a key or passcode before being sending across the Internet. The merchant has access to this password to decode the information. This is an ideal arrangement when doing business with a sole proprietor or single person.

If one of your business customers has many employees and each needs to make purchases over the Internet, public key cryptography is the right choice. With its two-tiered process—requiring verification of the employee’s private password and the company’s public password to conduct a transaction—this system helps you track individual and departmental spending.