Omnichannel

Fast-growing payments startup Adyen has secured $250 million from investors who have valued the Amsterdam-based startup at $1.5 billion.

Adyen serves as a middleman for Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb and other merchants, enabling them to accept Visa, MasterCard and soon bitcoin in nearly 200 currencies worldwide.

The eight-year-old company allows merchants to accept payments on the Web, mobile and more recently at individual points of sale.

Minneapolis – Target Corp. is aiming last-minute holiday promotions at users of its Cartwheel mobile savings app and customers in need of product delivery or pickup. Cartwheel is offering users 50% off a different toy every day until Dec. 24.   

London, U.K. – Phone calls may seem obsolete in this text- and online-based age, but U.S. consumers are still making the call when they purchase items. According to a new study from call-based marketing automation company ResponseTap, consumers in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to make a phone call when making a purchase, as opposed to purely transacting online.   

Los Angeles – Three out of four (76%) online buyers are dissatisfied with the strength of credit card and personal information security among retailers. According to a new survey of 6,200 online consumers aross all generations and both genders from Bizrate Insights, a shopper’s own bank is trusted the most with credit card data and personally identifiable information (72%).  

VeriFone and First Data are teaming up to help U.S. merchants reduce their exposure to data breaches and expedite merchant acceptance of EMV-enabled credit and debit cards.

Large-scale theft of consumer payment data from merchants’ integrated point-of-sale (POS) systems is among the biggest challenges facing the payments industry.

Brown Shoe Co. has sold its Shoes.com online division to a Seattle company looking to compete in a market dominated by Amazon.com and Foot Locker.

SHOEme, parent of OnlineShoes.com and Shoeme.ca, is purchasing Shoes.com for an undisclosed price, the companies said.

New York – The top holiday purchase items this year range from the less personal to the very personal. According to a recent online survey conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Macy’s among nearly 1,700 U.S. adults 18 and older who are holiday shoppers, gift cards (61%) and clothing (52%) top the list when it comes to the types of gifts that holiday shoppers plan to buy this season.    Other popular holiday items include:  

By Jeff Seabloom, Alsbridge   At one time, IT service providers could demonstrate their retail industry expertise by showing a PowerPoint slide of customer logos. That’s no longer sufficient.