From the pages of Appliance Retailer…

January 1998

Considering how slow to adapt some retailers are in 2014 (cough, Myer, cough) it is fascinating to read that internet shopping was a thing that appliance retailers were interested in and, potentially at least, investing in.

Here is how Appliance Retailer covered the launch of new security products 16 years ago:

Safer internet shopping will cost merchants

To improve shopping security over the internet, Westpac will adopt software created by Melbourne based company Australian Business Access, that provides a secure method of billing credit card users over the internet.

The software allows credit card merchants with a new way of processing internet transactions through Java applets instead of a separate application that has to be downloaded when an order is placed.

However, it will cost merchants $2,500 for the software and a fee of 95 cents per transaction.

Australian Business Access is not a company that foresaw Googling difficulties when it named itself so it is a little bit difficult to find out exactly what became of them — please shoot us a line if you know — but we do know that Westpac is still around, customers blanch at paying transaction fees for online purchases and absolutely everybody in the world hates Java plug-ins.