Amid the noise this week about SOPA and PIPA, and the stunning takedown of Megaupload, a very real business reality is upon us: e-Commerce is no longer the Wild, Wild West. If you’ve never watched Middle Men, the Luke Wilson movie about the first company to work out how to make money processing payments, it’s probably worth a watch. It tells the story of how the pioneers into the unregulated world of online content sales resulted in the first wave of government attention. And it’s likely as much a forecast of what is to come as it is a re-telling of what had already taken place.

Nobody in the industry is untouched by the increased scrutiny on what is being sold, how, and by whom. At Plimus, for instance, we’ve been involved lately in a couple of initiatives driven by the new need for transparency. As many people already know, we’ve recently updated our approach to processing PayPal sales, allowing each vendor to receive revenues into their own, self-directed PayPal account. And we’ve initiated detailed reviews of a number of vendors who are selling products that fit into some categories that are receiving some much closer examination by the credit card associations and other financial institutions.

Change is rarely comfortable, and of course for the vendors whose ability to sell through Plimus is currently curtailed, the business disruption is far from pleasant. Given our business model of making money only when sales actually close, it’s also not that appealing to Plimus to have to create barriers to making sales. In the context of where the industry is headed, however, it’s a natural progression that is both unavoidable and likely for the best in the long term.

Payment processing is really just a long line of trust: each player in the chain must trust those both up- and down-stream in order to agree to complete a transaction. The sophistication and obfuscation of the Web can make it difficult for each player to be absolutely sure who else is in that chain, and there has been a recent awakening to a need for much greater transparency up and down the line. Everyone is seeking to continually firm up their processes to ensure they can have 100% confidence that consumers are being handled properly, and that there’s nothing misleading going on at any stage of the game. It’s not nearly as exhilarating as the initial rush of setting up new and innovative ways to do business online, but it’s every bit as necessary to the long-term health and stability of the whole industry.

The new approach to PayPal is actually helping us get revenues into the coffers of our vendors more quickly, and will ultimately be a great catalyst in accelerating business’ ability to re-market and continue to optimize their sales. Expanding the transparency of our client base so that all the players in the financial chain have total confidence in the process will increase our ability to add new and exciting sales methods and business models, and ultimately increase the conversion ratios we can deliver to the whole community.

Change is never painless, but perhaps the move away from the Wild, Wild West will ultimately bring benefits that we can’t see through the clamor of updating and re-imagining today’s business processes. Either way, it’s a reality that history tells us is coming whether we like it or not.