While there are always certain bedrock things to be thankful for this time of year — one’s loved ones, good health, warm food on the table — a couple of holiday-themed articles this week underscore that there may be more to give thanks for, this fall, on the economic side, too. Certainly when compared to the more recent Thanksgivings since “The Great Recession.”
Month: November 2014
The Wallets, They Are A-Changin’
The Wallets, They Are A-Changin’ It’s That Time of Year It’s the time of year where customers are encouraged to…
Holiday Shopping Kicks Off to Record Sales — In China!
Black Friday may not quite be here yet, but in Canada, Thanksgiving has already come and gone, and in China — well, there they’re setting records already for online holiday shopping. We refer to the just-concluded “Singles Day,” in China, which comes on 11/11 — the idea being that all those “ones” emphasize “single-ness.” As Bloomberg News describes it “Singles’ Day, a Chinese twist on Valentine’s Day, was invented by students in the 1990s… When written numerically, the date is reminiscent of bare branches, the Chinese expression for bachelors and spinsters.”
Mobile Processing Allows You to Process a Transaction from Anywhere
Before the invention of the smart phone and tablet, businesses were limited with the types of transactions that they were able to process. In the store, credit card transactions could be processed through an in-store card reader, but it was difficult to take credit card payments from any other location. For a long time, businesses only accepted cash or check payments when they were on the road or at trade shows, but it sometimes limited the number of customers that could make a purchase.
The Road Ahead for Payments: Yellow Bricks, or Leaking Digits?
As our readers already know, changes are coming to the world of credit cards. Chief among those, as a new article in Wired states, are EMV cards, which “have an embedded microchip that authenticates the card as a legitimate bank card to prevent hackers from embossing stolen card data onto blank cards to use it for fraudulent transactions. The chip contains the same data that traditionally is stored on a card’s magnetic stripe, but also has a certificate used to digitally sign each transaction.
