Almost no e-commerce solutions handled credit cards. That was done by bank payment gateways. Anyway, most people didn't use credit cards either (and still don'

Almost no e-commerce solutions handled credit cards. That was done by bank payment gateways. Anyway, most people didn't use credit cards either (and still don't), preferring wire transfers, because they felt they had more control over those (instead of giving someone info they could use to take money from the card at any time, they'd initiate and control the transfer themselves - push vs pull approach). Times changed since then, but there was little financial risk to buyers from e-commerce not being encrypted at the time. You seem to be assuming some US situation, where using credit cards online and handing card details to actual e-commerce websites was/is maybe more common. But this article you're commenting under is about EU and I'm providing an experience from one of the EU member countries. So US situation is not relevant.