eBay will pay $370 million for an online payment service operated by VeriSign as part of a broader agreement between the two companies, eBay announced this week, CNET reports. VeriSign's payment gateway business allows small businesses to accept credit card and other payment types online; it processed more than $40 billion in customer transactions last year. eBay views it as a way to expand PayPal to a new category of small-to-medium-sized businesses.

eBay will also tap VeriSign for a wider range of digital security protections, including a new kind of transaction protection from VeriSign that will give customers one-time passwords or digital certificates to guard against identity theft.