- 4 - Payment Opportunities From B2B E-commerce McGuffog, April 2001 ©2001 Sixhills Consulting Ltd & Author Exhibit 2. Payment systems interfaces Making a payment At the most basic level, payments can be characterized by what the mechanism is, and when in the transaction cycle (and by who) a decision to pay gets made. View this way, there are only really five basic ways that a payment can be made, three traditional and two “new age e-commerce” payment methods. The three traditional payment methods are: 1. Cheque, the most traditional form of payment other than cash. With cheque payments, the buyer takes the decision to pay (by writing the cheque), usually once the goods and an invoice have arrived. 2. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). EFT payments are, for the purposed of e-commerce, simply an electronic version of a cheque. Again, the buyer takes the decision to pay (usually by entering the payment data into a bank-supplied cash management system), once the goods and an invoice have arrived. In larger companies, the cash management system is often linked to an accounts payable (A/P) or ERP system, so that account details don’t need to be retyped. Occasionally, the timing of the payment will also be set by the accounts payable system or a treasury management system, so as to optimise cash flow. However, EFT payments is essence remain simple electronic cheques. 3. Purchasing Card. Purchasing cards, the corporate world’s version of credit cards (they differ only in often actually being debit cards, sometimes being limited to operation with a small group of approved vendors and having more sophisticated information reporting capabilities that their retail cousins) are currently the only payment mechanism
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