Abstract: An online commerce architecture enables merchants to setup online stores that are hosted by third party Internet service providers (ISPs). The architecture provides secure storage of the merchant's commerce information at the ISP-hosted store, based upon a private/public key pair owned by the merchant. When a purchase request is received from a customer, the ISP encrypts all or part of the request using a newly generated session key, and then encrypts that session key with the merchant's public key. The purchase request is stored at the ISP in its encrypted form. The merchant routinely accesses the ISP and retrieves the purchase requests in their encrypted form. The merchant decrypts the session key using the merchant's private key and then decrypts the purchase request using the recovered session key. Since only the merchant knows its private key, no one else (including the ISP) can decrypt the session key to decrypt the purchase requests for the merchant.