Safer shopping - the customer experience of paying online

The world of e-commerce has moved on at a fierce pace crushing conventional shopping thinking and destroying the high street in its wake. As more customers become increasingly comfortable shopping over the Internet so has the maturity of fraud activity working to exploit this digital channel and the naivety of many of its virgin users. As a result epic experiences demand both convenience and security when providing payment details now that they can no longer rely on the assurance a conventional shop would provide.  There are many rivals to the secure payment arena with tech start ups such as PayPal (www.paypal.com) founded as recently as 2000 competing with traditional banks like Barclays offering new services such as PingIt. The customer requirements are simple, wanting to be able to shop on line as simply as possible while making it as difficult as possible for fraudulent activity to corrupt that experience. From a customer perspective we don't really care how or who manages and owns this payment connection, in fact to the customer this should be invisible and merely a background activity that can be relied upon in the same way as sending an email. For an epic customer experience make it meet the requirements but don't shout about it. Just get it done so we don't have to worry.