In 2005, major credit card companies and major private shippers agreed to ban payment transactions and shipments for all cigarette sales.
That ban has been effective in reducing online cigarette vendors, according to a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study.
While brick-and-mortar tobacco retailers have to comply with age, identity and tax policies, "Internet vendors are often ignoring all of these policies, and they're undercutting and selling a cigarettes a lot cheaper," Kurt Ribisl, lead author of the study, told Tobacco E-News.
The study, published [image-nocss] in the journal PLoS One included three years of comparison data on the top cigarette vendor sites. It found that following the bans, many Web sites closed down and there was a 1.25 million fewer visits per month after the ban.
The researchers also found that vendors accepting credit cards and PayPal dropped from 99.2 percent to 37.4 percent, and those offering to ship via UPS, FedEx and other commercial shippers dropped from 32.2 percent to 5.6 percent.
Ribisl said the research was geared toward looking at public health.
"We do think that if we can cut down on Internet sales, ultimately it will have a positive benefit on public health," He added, "Some people may quit, but some people might go back to buying at stores. The nice thing about the stores is there's an existing regulatory system where you can do a better job of controlling the sales than through the Internet."
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