SoVerNet---E-Commerce Glossary

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Digital or electronic cash: Also called “e-cash,” these terms refer to any of several schemes enabling payment for goods or services by transmitting a number from one computer to another. The numbers, just like those on a dollar bill, are issued by a bank and represent specified sums of real money. One of the key features of digital cash is that it's anonymous and reusable, just like real cash. This is a key difference between e-cash and credit card transactions over the Internet.

Electronic wallet: This is a payment scheme that stores your credit card numbers on your hard drive in an encrypted form. You can then make purchases at Web sites that support that particular electronic wallet. When you go to a participating online store, you click a Pay button to initiate a credit card payment via a secure transaction enabled by the electronic wallet company’s server.

Public-key encryption: one of the strongest encryption methods available, it’s a system that uses two keys—a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. An important element to the public key system is that only the public key can encrypt messages and only the corresponding private key can decrypt them. Public-key systems, such as PGP, are becoming popular for transmitting information via the Internet because they are extremely secure and relatively simple to use.

Secure server: A Web server that supports any of the major security protocols, like SSL, that encrypt and decrypt messages to protect them against third party tampering.

Secure Electronic Transactions (SET): SET encodes the credit card numbers stored on merchants’ servers. This standard, created by Visa and MasterCard, enjoys wide support in the banking community.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): A protocol designed to create a secure connection to a server using “public key encryption,” to protect data as it travels over the Internet. SSL was created by Netscape but has now been published in the public domain.

Shopping cart: A metaphor for a piece of software that acts as an online store’s catalog and ordering process. Typically, a shopping cart is the graphical interface linking a company’s ecommerce site with its deeper infrastructure. Consumers can select merchandise; review what they have selected; modify their selections; and ultimately purchase the merchandise. Shopping carts can be sold as independent pieces of software so companies can integrate them into their own unique online solution, or they can may be integrated into a complete merchant application.

Trust-e: A partnership of companies seeking to build public trust in ecommerce by putting a Good Housekeeping-style seal of approval on sites that don’t violate consumer privacy.

GLOSSARY