Bank of America's rivals will range from the new zShops section of Amazon.com Inc's heavily trafficked Web site to Wells Fargo & Co, a San Francisco bank that launched its One-Stop eStore for small businesses last month. "If we don't do this for them, they will go somewhere else," Sharif Bayyari, president and chief executive officer of Bank of America's merchant-services unit, said.

Bank of America's biggest potential advantage as it rolls out the service, called Internet Order Center, is its huge base of about two million business customers, more than any other US bank. Bank officials are considering promoting companies that sign up for the service to almost 20 million retail-banking customers with its credit cards. Bank of America said it will collect a fee of $100 a month from merchants who use the service to track inventory, generate shipping information and authorise customer payments, as well as a small transaction fee every time a credit card is used to make a purchase.

The bank also can build a merchant's Web site from scratch for as little as about $250. "In effect, I'm getting an entire finance department," said Steve Owens, owner of Meadow Wood Group Inc, a Rancho Mirage, Calif, hockey-stick seller that has been using the Web-based service for about three weeks.

With competition growing fierce, analysts said Bank of America's Web-based service is likely to succeed only if it can avoid technological glitches as it grows. Andrew Efstathiou, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, a research firm in Boston, said the bank is exposing itself to a public-relations risk because its name and logo will appear on each participating merchant's Web site. "If [the bank's] brand name is out in front and it's the merchant's fault, it will adversely impact [the bank's] brand image," he said.

The Wall Street Journal