CyberCash Invests In Commission Junction to Boost InstaBuy

Computergram International, July 21, 1999

CyberCash Inc has bought a minority equity stake in a start-up e- commerce affiliate program company to boost take-up of its InstaBuy one-click shopping wallet technology. It has invested $7m for an undisclosed minority stake in Santa Barbara, California-based Commission Junction, which currently has around 90 merchants and 85,000 affiliates that it links together. As well as the stake, the deal means that as of September, any of those affiliates will be able to take advantage of InstaBuy, which enables users to carry over credit card information from one merchant to another without typing it all in, either through direct integration of InstaBuy or automatic form-filling.

Take up of InstaBuy has been relatively slow, as the company admitted in a second quarter profit warning earlier this week. Only has about six companies have fully integrated the InstaBuy cartridge so far, but CyberCash says it has already profiled the top 100 e-commerce web sites that will enable InstaBuy to populate forms automatically on those sites. It hopes to have about 200 more done by next month and it will integrate InstaBuy with its CashRegister product later this year, which will bring those 14,000 merchants into the system automatically.

Commission Junction not only links merchants with affiliates, it also keeps track of the referrals. For CyberCash, it means more places to use its wallet, while enabling the merchants and their affiliates to keep their customers' eyeballs. It says that payment models like this will not fly if users are driven away from the merchant's site to complete the transaction. The version of InstaBuy that ships this week will be the first with automatic form-filling capabilities.