VeriSign reports transaction volume rose 40% in 2003 over previous year

Online consumer payment transactions processed by VeriSign rose by more than 40% in 2003 over the previous year, reports the company. While dollar volumes will be reported with earnings later this month, its online transactions represent several billion dollars per quarter, according to the company.

Used to process online transaction by more than 100,000 merchants, VeriSign transactions account for about 30% of North American e-commerce, providing a fairly representative snapshot of e-commerce trends overall. More than 30 million Internet payment transactions were processed by VeriSign at the height of holiday shopping in Q4 alone. Mirroring the overall growth in online shopping, the dollar value of the average online transaction processed by VeriSign in 2003 rose as well, up $22 from $122 in 2002 to $144 in 2003.

Shopping volume on Mondays, already the busiest day for online shopping, offered an interesting data point. VeriSign’s Monday transaction volume rose 65% in 2003 over 2002. “There are a lot of theories behind Monday’s shopping volume, one being that people do their window shopping in the malls on weekends and come in Monday to comparison shop online,” says a VeriSign spokesman.