CyberCash Inc has launched the Instabuy.com web site to promote its eponymous single-click payment technology through its partnership with Impulse Buy Network Inc, which became an InstaBuy partner last October. Impulse has pulled together around 100 online merchants, including Barnes & Noble, Eddie Bauer and Sharper Image and put them on the instabuy.com web site, though CyberCash emphasized that the web site is its own. However, it also emphasized that it is not trying to establish a commerce portal, merely trying to increase the take-up of InstaBuy by consumers, merchants and financial institutions. InstaBuy stores customer and payment information for future use. The first time a consumer makes an online purchase with a participating merchant, the information is captured in the InstaBuy software and secured by the financial institution. When the consumer makes a further purchase at any participating merchant’s site, InstaBuy fills in the payment screen with the purchase information. The consumer verifies the information and completes the purchase with a single click. CyberCash executive VP Dennis Yaro says InstaBuy is a good way of avoiding lots of abandoned shopping carts found on e-commerce web sites at the moment as buyers balk at paying for the merchandise they have chosen. He says it is too soon to say whether the portal or the straight mall model will win, or something else entirely. Although the merchants on the sites are Impulse’s partners, he promises that several of them are going to be our partners, in the very near future. Announcements about that are expected before the end of this quarter and early next quarter CyberCash is promising more financial institutions will join First USA, which is the first financial partner to offer InstaBuy.
