The principal electronic payment systems for electronic commerce are:
2011
The principal electronic payment systems for electronic commerce are:
Answer: D. All of the above — Concept: in electronic commerce a payment system is any arrangement that transfers value from a buyer to a seller over a network in place of physical cash.…
- A.
Credit Card
- B.
Digital Wallet
- C.
Electronic Cheque
- D.
All of the above
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Correct answer: D
Concept: in electronic commerce a payment system is any arrangement that transfers value from a buyer to a seller over a network in place of physical cash. Standard e-commerce texts classify such arrangements by two things — what holds the value being spent, and which channel clears the transfer — which yields distinct families: card-network instruments, software wallets that store and present a credential, and account-based instruments that clear through the banking system. Asking for the principal electronic payment systems therefore asks which families the discipline recognises, not which single family is most widely used.
Application: each instrument named in this item belongs to one of those families, as set out below.
Instrument | What holds the value | How the transfer clears |
|---|---|---|
Credit card | A revolving credit line extended to the holder by the issuing bank | Card network: the merchant's gateway sends the credentials to an acquiring bank, which obtains real-time authorisation from the issuer; settlement follows afterwards |
Digital wallet | A card, bank account or stored balance kept as a credential in software on a device or server | The wallet presents that credential, usually as a token, and the underlying instrument then clears through its own channel |
Electronic cheque | The payer's demand-deposit (current or savings) account | Banking cheque-clearing, with a digital signature standing in for the drawer's handwritten one |
All three appear as separate entries in the standard classification of e-commerce payment systems: Laudon and Traver's E-commerce: Business, Technology, Society enumerates online credit card transactions, digital wallets and digital checking (the electronic cheque) among the principal systems, alongside digital cash and stored-value accounts. Because the question asks for the principal systems as a group and no single family exhausts that group, the choice that covers the whole set — All of the above — is correct.
Cross-check: the elimination test is whether any named instrument falls outside the definition given at the start. Each of the three moves value from a buyer to a seller over a network and appears in the standard enumeration, so none can be dropped; and each single-instrument choice names only one family, so none of them can stand for the entire set.