Swiping your credit card at your PC. It’s so simple - why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

Actually, they have been trying to do this for a long time. Dig hard enough and you’ll unearth the remains of a number of “secure credit card reader” devices for personal use, some dating back as far as 10 years ago. And they’re still trying to do it - there are dozens of companies out there trying to develop all sorts of neat little gadgets for secure online shopping (some of which are pretty dubious in terms of security). But nobody’s ever been able to make it fly. Why not?

Rarely, if ever, has there been a situation like the state of online commerce – everyone is feeling the pain from inadequate security. Consumers are getting ripped off, merchants are suffering huge losses, and banks don’t know what to do. People are falling all over themselves trying to develop new security technologies to solve the problem of online security. There’s a lot of money to be made if you can be “the” company that comes up with the solution. But they’re all chasing rainbows. The problem cannot be solved by technology.

Think about it this way - the payment industry is losing billions of dollars per year to online fraud, even though security technologies for secure transactions are widely available. You’d think that if it were simply a technical problem, the payment industry would have solved it a long time ago.

So if technology isn’t the problem, why did we invent SmartSwipe? What makes us different from everyone else who has tried this?

Simple. It’s all about the customer.

The problem with all these other so-called solutions is that they require a merchant to invest their time and money into changing their existing systems to support the new product. Of course, a merchant isn’t going to do that unless they know that people are going to use the product. So, the first question from the merchant is always “How many customers do you have?”. For a new product the answer is zero, and very few merchants are ever willing to take the chance to invest in a payment product with no customers. The problem is, how can you get customers for a product that you can’t use anywhere? Would you pay $150 for a secure payment device that you could only use at a handful of websites (most of which you probably haven’t heard of and probably wouldn’t carry any of the products or services you want)? Of course not. Online shopping is about choice and convenience – any product that limits convenience or choice will fail, and fail miserably. It’s like inventing the world’s fastest, most secure train, that doesn’t stop at any destinations. It may look shiny, but nobody is going to ride it.

That’s where the SmartSwipe is different. The SmartSwipe is the only security product ever developed that doesn’t limit the choice or convenience for the customer. It works at any website out of the box. No changes are required at the merchant end, because we’ve designed the SmartSwipe to work with the secure payment infrastructure they already have in place. It’s the shiny train that stops at all the destinations.

The SmartSwipe is the first and only product of its kind that’s being sold on retail store shelves, because we’re the first and only product that can actually give the customer what they want – security for online commerce, with all the choice and convenience that people expect when they choose to shop online.

Have we found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Only time will tell, but based on the feedback we’ve received so far, we hope it’s only time until the SmartSwipe becomes a household name.