BT Dot.com: Will You Give This Man Your Number?

Credit cards on-line are a no-no for many surfers. Will the alternatives jumpstart e-Commerce?

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If you feel unsafe putting your credit card on the Net, you're in good company. Why, while researching this story, we didn't dare put our cards on-line! Certainly not after what this nice gentleman, who has been researching credit card usage all his life, told us. Vijay Mehta, 57, Chief Consultant, Credit Card & Management Consultancy, was blunt: ''According to our survey of 5,000 card-holders across 10 Indian cities, 72 per cent are wary of giving credit card numbers over the Net.''

You know that already, don't you? Worldwide, on-line security and privacy are cited as among the main reasons for not clicking on the ''add to shopping cart'' button. There are other understandable fears: on-line merchants' antecedents, redressal, the lack of adoption of technologies like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Secure Electronic Transaction (set), bandwidth, and back-end logistics.

A host of e-Commerce sites are trying to work around the problem. Till now, shoppers on the Net had few options than putting their credit cards on-line. Sure, cash-on-delivery is an established medium, even though it's like flying the Concorde on kerosene. Rediff.com, for example, had recently tied-up with courier companies to offer this service at 800 locations across the country. ''This service is important in a country where the number of Net users is growing, yet credit-card penetration is low,'' says Ajit Balakrishnan, 52, Chairman & Managing Director, Rediff.com.

Then, banks like Global Trust Bank, ICICI, HDFC, Citibank, and the UTI, have been putting up their own payment gateways. On the back of this standard security level, ICICI has tied up with 15 top web merchants, and Citibank with three. The problem is that only account holders and card holders with a secret pin can shop on sites offering links to these service providers. We surfed through the alternatives.

To start with, we checked out the pre-paid cards. It's just like an on-line debit card. You buy a Smartcc.com card for, say Rs 1,000, and scratch out the 16-digit alphanumeric number behind the card. Punch in at the web-site, and Rs 1,000 is credited to your account. A surfer can go to a select list of e-tailers and can buy goods for the entire sum, or for part of it. The balance remains in your account. ''In three months, we intend to sell one lakh cards and our target is 76 per cent of the Net users who do not have a card,'' says Divyanshu Mishra, 27, CEO, Smartcc.com.

The main irritant here is having to buy small-denomination cards too frequently. Another variant is Citibank's Suvidha, an ATM card that is Net-enabled. Of course, you have to be customers of the service, available only in Bangalore and Mumbai. There's limited risk, but the power to pay is limited too.

There are sites that offer an on-line variant of the pre-paid card. For instance, register and give your credit card details at pknid.com, and they mail you a Personal Key Number (PKN). Every time you make a purchase on a site pknid.com has a tie up with, you punch in this PKN instead of the credit card number. There's no issue of the small purchase limit here, and as long as no one steals your encrypted PKN, you're home safe.

Credit card majors are not far behind. Mastercard has tied up with Citibank to launch a virtual card. For instance, Mastercard gives you a number, which you use to make all your on-line purchases. The spending limit on the virtual card is Rs 12,000 and, additional checks will be carried out before authorising the transaction.

The other mode is the electronic wallet. Mastercard has tied up with IBM (IBM wallet) and Trintech (Trintech e-wallet) for electronic wallets. The electronic wallets enable cardholders to enter and store their Mastercard access number and their shipping and billing addresses just once. The wallet can then be used to automatically complete order forms. Using SSL and set, it transfers the information through a high security route. What remains to be seen is whether consumers would like their financial data resting on the desktop.

And then you have virtual currencies. These loyalty-based schemes are restricted to an individual site or a collection of partner sites. For instance, Fabmart's Fabmoney is a pre-paid card available in different denominations. These are sold on cash basis at cyber cafes called FabPoints in six cities. Fabmart has a secure 17-digit, randomly-generated number, which the customer enters on the site as part of the transaction. Similarly, netwalla.com gives you net points on any purchase that you make in selected brick and mortar stores. These points allow you to make purchases from a catalogue at the netwalla.com site.

At the end of the day, will the consumer actually use these payment crutches to buy on the Net? Even novelty purchases will be milestones in the long and uncertain road ahead.