Facebook seeks e-commerce team

Facebook is turning up the heat on becoming a big player in the online payments world, according to a couple of job postings for a new 'Facebook payment operations' team that recently appeared on its site, says CNET News.

The social network is seeking a 'payment operations strategist' to "work cross-functionally with the product and engineering teams to design tools and systems to serve our hundreds of millions of users and our ever-growing base of advertisers," as well as a risk management specialist to be based in its Dublin, Ireland, office to handle billing, payment, and security operations in European and Middle Eastern countries.

"Projects driven by payment operations team members will potentially contribute millions of dollars to Facebook's business, as well as enable the company to scale and expand its operations in the coming years," the careers site explained.

The founding member of a global criminal Web site responsible for tens of millions of pounds of credit card crime is facing a lengthy jail term, reports Times Online.

Renukanth Subramaniam, 33, set up Darkmarket, which enabled criminals to buy the stolen credit card details of hundreds of thousands of people, many from Britain.

In between delivering pizzas he used an Internet caf'e in Wembley, northwest London, to create the site that was described by investigators as a “shop window for criminality”.

Following a tough 2009, consumers are still watching the pennies, but despite this the pre-Christmas period saw a significant increase in online sales, with retailers posting impressive figures for the last quarter, states Computing.co.uk.

Sales on John Lewis's Web site, re-launched early last year, were 14% up on 2008's total, as the chain's conservative customer base grew more comfortable with the idea of shopping online.

Meanwhile, announcing Marks & Spencer third-quarter results, chief executive Stuart Rose says the company had improved its online market share by 32%, despite seeing fairly flat results for in-store sales.