Transactions

From the initial planning stages of your business's site to actual electronic transactions, the Internet is at the center of it all. It allows you to conduct research, contact vendors, obtain your domain name, analyze the market, and study the competition. The Internet will serve as an electronic storefront for your business, giving you exposure 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

BelSign
The digital certificate authority for Europe. Issues certificates to individuals and for servers.

CommerceNet
CommerceNet is an association of members participating in Internet commerce. There are two levels of membership, Valuable information is available on this site to nonmembers; it should be bookmarked in your browser as a resource for Internet business news. Especially worth reading is "Building the Imarket" by the chair of CommerceNet, Jay M. Tenenbaum. This article covers all forms of electronic payment being used today and provides insight into electronic forms of payment that may be used tomorrow.

E-Commerce News
Articles on who's doing what in the world of electronic commerce.

MasterCard
MasterCard has developed SET along with Visa, and more information about SET is available from this site. See the New Ways to Pay section for more about SET and electronic commerce in general.

Netscape Certificate Server
An administrator can use Certificate Server to create, sign, and manage certificates for all users, configuring other servers to accept only authorized user certificates. A scalable database built into Certificate Server stores the status of each certificate. The issuance and revocation of certificates can be centrally administered.

Pretty Good Privacy
PGP, is widely recognized encryption freeware distributed by MIT.PGP works by designating a public key within the application. You may also encrypt entire directories to hide them from prying eyes on your personal computer. PGP is also available in a commercial version from the software's author, Phillip Zimmerman.

Thawte
Offers Netscape, MSIE, PGP and other generic X.509 software users a full range of personal certification services. Issues digital certificates for individuals and servers.

The Small Business Administration
This site provides information at your fingertips related to producing income by being on the Internet. The information also instructs you on what you will need when you go before the Small Business Administration to request funding. Also available are instructions for contacting the Small Business Administration's offices near you.

UniCERT
A fully X.509 compatible CA system for Internet and Intranet systems. It can issue certificates for email (S/MIME), Web (SSL) and SET systems.

ValiCert
A digital certificate tracking system that allows an application vendor to incorporate the ability to check the validity of a certificate to an end-user application such as an electronic mail client or a Web browser.

Wells Fargo
Offers certificates to merchants who do business on the Internet. These certificates carry the Wells Fargo Brand but are issued by GTE CyberTrust. Call Wells Fargo for more information.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
W3C's purpose is to develop common standards for worldwide use in Web development. W3C, whose members are scattered all over the globe, is best known for its review of the HTML language. The existence of this consortium provides assurance that the Hypertext Mark-Up Language on any server worldwide is compliant with a uniform standard. W3C did a recent study of what forms of payment are being used to conduct business on the Web. The released report can be viewed at
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Payments