E-Wallet_s Ambitious Plans.

Microsoft unveiled its own e-wallet and announced that 50 Web vendors, including such heavyweights as Dell and Barnesandnoble.com, plan to use it. It could be the first step towards a future in which the bulk of online bucks travel through Microsoft, allowing the company to take a pricey toll, analysts said. An e-wallet is a little software widget that stores your credit card information, shipping address, and Web site passwords. Once an e-wallet user enters that information once, he can shop at any site that accepts the wallet without having to fill out new billing forms. Microsoft_s e-wallet will also let users access any partner sites with a single password. A nice little consumer convenience, all-in-all, and one that such big consumer sites as AOL, Excite, and Yahoo have deployed within the bounds of their own sites. But because Microsoft_s e-wallet is deployed across several sites, it opens up a slew of money-generating possibilities for both Microsoft and its partners. First off, partner sites will pay Microsoft an annual fee for the software. They_ll do this not because they couldn_t build or buy the software elsewhere, said analysts, but because Microsoft will let partners market their wares to all of the millions of folks who sign up for the e-wallet, regardless of whether they_ve ever visited the partner site. for advertising partners. Microsoft will also be logging records of all the sales across its partner sites, building up a monumental database of aggregate data that it might then be able to sell back to partners in the future, who could use it to gauge themselves against competitors and hone their offerings. Microsoft may also create profiles of individual shoppers in the future, logging what they buy where, allowing partners to target finely honed pitches to a known audience -- one of the Web_s holy grails. As a pre-condition to using its software, Microsoft insists that all partner sites have a posted privacy policy, but doesn_t dictate what that policy should be.