On this blog we have discussed online purchases and online transaction handling before – usually in the context of usability or path to purchase. More often than not, we’ve ended up drawing comparisons to, or extolling the virtues of a sophisticated offline business process and asking the question, “Physical stores don’t work in this manner, so why are you making your online store work this way?” Ever heard the phrase ‘technology for technologies sake?’ We have, and it’s not pretty.

And yet, every so often the opposite happens. The online paradigm shifts an offline business process profoundly and sharply.

One such occurrence is related to purchasing. To me it seems that as eCommerce has become more mainstream, ‘ease in purchasing’ has become a pre-requisite for shopping generally.

One approach to defuse poor ease in purchasing offline is off course to invest in customer service representatives to smooth away any ill feeling. But another way is to invest in technology and its integration.

And so it transpires that earlier this month more than 1,000 London retail outlets including those at ‘Threshers’ and food chains ‘Yo Sushi!’ and ‘Eat’ have all signed up for a “contactless” payment facility. If ‘ease’ and ‘trust’ could be encapsulated “contactless” payment is it.

The so-called “tap and pay” system (like Transport for London’s Oyster payment network), is being launched in the autumn and other retailers are already on board too – ‘Krispy Kreme’, ‘Coffee Republic’, ‘Books Etc’ and the ‘Science Museum’.

Adding to the momentum, payment providers Mastercard and Visa have announced plans to offer contactless cards, which allow transactions of up to £10 without the need to sign or enter a pin number via their member banks. (The system, which is already popular in the US through outlets including fast food chain McDonald’s, aims to speed up payments and reduce queues.)

It is certain is that we can expect a great amount of marketing noise (good and bad) to emerge through 2008 as cashless payments start to become a reality.  ‘Ease’ and ‘Trust’ are key – and these are tricky subjects. But what price contactless cards will become a de-facto standard payment method offline?  My bet this is not a trend. This is going to grow like wildfire. First stop £10, next stop £25.  Soon.

Suddenly strategic plays involving loyalty cards and their underlying information seem very interesting indeed. And how will the mobile operators respond? They have also long been touted as the payment mechanism de-rigour.

Who can tell which way payment will shift? The only certainty is that as retailers use technology to make even more money – they’ll end up handling less of the dirty cash itself.

eBay has resumed advertising on Google after the two companies’ well-publicised clash earlier this month, but all is not forgiven.The online auction company said it would use Google’s ad platforms in a “much more limited way” and focus more on rival ad services.

eBay, one of Google’s biggest PPC clients, yanked its advertising earlier this month in protest at Google’s plan to hold a promotional event for its Checkout payment system outside eBay’s annual conference for merchants in Boston.

The idea was to lobby eBay to allow Checkout to compete with eBay’s Paypal system on the auction site, but backfired royally. The ban remained in place despite Google’s event being cancelled.

eBay then increased its ad spend on Yahoo!., Ask and MSN in what it called an “ongoing experiment” into how it promoted its auctions across different media channels.

Announcing its return to Google on Friday, spokesperson Hani Durzy told Reuters that eBay’s use of the search engine would be “much more limited” than before, adding:

“What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.”

• Game has acquired Gamestation from Blockbuster for £74 million, which will give it a boost as it adds 217 stores to its portfolio in the UK.

• Scene7 is to be acquired by Adobe.

• Doubleclick has been acquired by Google for £1.6bn. Microsoft complained the merger could have a monopolistic effect and US regulators are reviewing the deal.

• Jakob Nielsen claims Web 2.0 “neglects good design” practice. Personalisation can make sites “glossy but useless” and designers should focus on usability, good search, and jargon-free text first. Remember Boo.com? Looked great, didn’t sell…

• A version of the Ubuntu Linux o/s will be developed for net-enabled phones and devices.

• IMRG estimates that the global internet shopping marketplace will be worth £250bn in 2007. UK Shoppers will spend £78 billion a year online by 2010 – doubling the web’s share of retail sales to 20%. This year internet shopping is expected to reach £42bn. Internet sales grew by 3,553% between April 2000 and December 2006.

• eBay profits soared by 52%, its quarterly profits grew to $377 million, a leap of 52%, with a 26% surge in the number of registered users. eBay’s global revenue rose 27% to $1.77 billion, which the company attributes to a 51% rise in payments through PayPal.

• According to eGain Research conducted in December 2006, 38 per cent of major UK companies are ignoring e-mails from their customers. 67 per cent fail to deliver an acceptable response to customer e-mails. Only 10% of retailers managed to respond within one hour, which was the poorest performance amongst all sectors tested.

• The Launch of the Kate Moss range of clothes helped www.topshop.co.uk achieve its highest rank and share of visits of the past year. The website ranked number 2 among Apparel and Accessories websites and number 138 among all UK sites, exceeding its previous high of position 238 on 26th December 2006. Demand on the Topshop website was reportedly so high that the Kate Moss collection sold out in just 12 hours.

• Home Retail Group has reported annual profit at the top end of estimates, and said it is confident of making of making further progress this year. The group reported profit before tax, goodwill and one-off items up 12 per cent to £376.7m in the year ended 3 March 2007.

• Microsoft unveils Table Computer…