by Wendy Cholbi

If you think you haven't engaged in electronic commerce, think again.

The majority of the hype surrounding electronic transactions consists of stories of how risky they are. But electronic commerce is more than checking your bank account via the Internet, ordering theatre tickets online, or opening an account that uses E-Cash. Keep reading to learn some of the basics of electronic commerce, and its risks and rewards.

First, not all electronic commerce is Internet commerce. You may have never made a purchase from a company's Web site, but if you've ever used a credit or debit card, you've taken part in an electronic transaction. Every time you use an ATM or your bank's automated phone system, you are sending financial information via electronic networks.

The networks on which these transactions are carried are private. The bank's phone system, owned by the bank itself, is an example. The networks that carry many ATM transactions, such as Plus, Cirrus, MAC, MOST, and others, are owned by groups of banks. Credit card transactions are routed through networks owned by Visa and MasterCard.

In a typical credit card purchase, the retailer swipes your card through an authorization terminal, sending the card number to a merchant processor. This processor's function is to receive many such requests and route them through a national switch (owned by Visa or MasterCard) to the bank that issued the credit card. The bank verifies that the credit card number is legitimate and sends the response back through the MasterCard or Visa switch to the processor, which transmits it back to the retailer's terminal. This part of the process usually only takes a few seconds, but the transaction is not settled (completed) until several hours later, when the issuer makes a settlement payment to the merchant.

Most of us use these networks on a daily basis, and we have come to trust them with our money. For Internet credit card payments, although the processing is the same, the very first step of the transaction — the one where you hand the card to the merchant — happens electronically, too. If you've ever ordered anything by phone with your credit card, you have sent sensitive financial information using a medium that is much easier to tap than an encrypted Web transmission. It should be noted that e-mail is a different matter; e-mail messages are not normally encrypted (unless you use PGP or other encryption methods) and so should not be regarded as secure.

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