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The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages. To put this into perspective, $20 (typical magazine subscription) will be enough pages for 82% of our readers to view Slashdot without ads for a year. Another 15% will need to spend $5 a month to accomplish the same thing. 3% of our readers would need to spend more than $5 a month- but they could choose to see ads on comments and in almost every case, still pay around $5 a month. (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3%) {Emphasis mine]

Other people have faced this problem
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, everybody who was anybody in the computer world was on CompuServe. And each CompuServe forum competed for members (and the connection time revenue that the member paid) based on the help, support, community, files, or messaging that it provided. It was--explicitly--pay-for-content. It was precisely the business model that you guys want to adopt.

Savvy forum operators knew the statistics: only 5% of forum members ever posted a comment. And roughly 1% of forum members posted 90% of the comments. The more commments (particularly the more substantive comments), the more forum members there were--95% of whom were "read-only" lurkers. Thus, it paid to encourage people to post comments.

This policy discourages people from posting comments
Think of what you have to do to post a comment:

• Link to the "Post Comment" page (1 hit)
• Click on the Preview button to check formatting (1 hit)
• Submit the page (1 hit)

Are you done? Nope. You'd better hope your comment doesn't get mod'd up--because you'll get "messages" telling you that. Link to that page? (1 hit). You'd better hope you haven't contributed something provocative that produces replies--because you'll have to read each reply (1 hit apiece), and possibly post a response (3 hits per response, see above).

In short, contributing to SlashDot, writing interesting comments, getting mod'd up, and responding to replies now will cost you money. That is, all the things that you (SlashDot) want people to do (desperately need people to do) you are going to charge money for. You're creating disincentives to provide you with content--and that content is what you're trying to sell to subscribers.

What smart forum operators did was to issue "free flags". Each forum contractor got a certain amount of free forum time to award to forum users who helped out in one way or another. There were sysop accounts for people who did administrative things--but there were a lot more free flags for regular forum members who just participated in a lot of conversations. It would make a *lot* of sense for you to do the same thing.

In the ultimate geek world you'd be able to automate a process to identify people making significant contributions. That's what moderation is, after all. But automated processes can be manipulated (i.e. karma whoring)--this probably requires some individual discretion. Identify significant contributors (you can start with high-karma users, but I'm sure you can identify other factors to consider) and grant them free access. You want them posting comments all the time--those are the people whose peers have voted to indicate that their voices should be heard. The very last thing you want to do is get those people contributing less, because each contribution now costs them at least 3 page hits.

Oh, yeah--Paypal?
Be serious. If OSDN and VA Software is on such shaky ground that you can't get a merchant account through CyberCash or someone else, you have serious problems.

So you're sending your credit card details to an anonymising service. How long will you stay anonymous?

Exactly why we need government backed (so it's accepted) digital cash (a.k.a. e-cash) (cash so it's anonymous).

Any bets how soon that will happen, post 9-11?

(Yes, I am aware of the downside.)

Please folks, before you get over exited, I would consider that there is some panic on PayPals side involved in going for IPO, getting new capital in and expand RAPIDLY before others catch up. PayPal used to be pretty unique and the banks (even if Deutsche Bank was one of the original investors), especially big banking, pretty much stayed away from them. Why did the banks do that? They thought a technology driven company like Paypal (and DigiCash (today known as eCash Technologies), CyberCash(aquired by VeriSign and others), GlobeSET(acquired by Trintech) and many more ...) never posed a threat to the big banks. Then Paypal started to do something you shall not do . Disintermediate the banks. Now the banks think, wow, they are stealing customers from us. So there are various new initiatives on their way. Visa 3-D Secure ( See here), which is _first_ aimed to eliminate consumer fraud but has extensions in the protocol for later P2P use, NACHA has several initiatives on the way: ISAP which is again _first_ an internet payment protocol but will carry into P2P later, Project Action which will aim directly at the eBay Payments of PayPal. So they are afraid. They are afraid for a good reason. They need money to compete (and, according to rumours they are pretty much running out of it). So an IPO is a logical step. Maybe they will even make it in these difficult times ...

It might look to you that the bank just takes the charge of no questions asked, but as soon as your stepdad leaves the bank, the CC company will make sure they get their money from the merchant.

Bottomline is, the merchant pays if they can't proof a purchase was made. And even if they can proof it, a merchant will do a return to prevent him/herself from the chargeback fee that the bank will charge them if the customer complains with their credit card issuer.

[shameless plug]
Merchants who are currently experiencing a high fraud rate might want to take a look at CyberCash's FraudPatrol Internet fraud detection service: http://www.cybercash.com/fraudpatrol/
[/shameless plug]

Yeah. Cybercash used to be free; now they take a cut. Yahoo Store (formerly Viamall) used to be flat rate; now they take a cut and force you to do online payment processing through their favored bank. Be careful about getting locked into some outfit without a long term contract.

I doubt there will ever be a plug-and-play open source e-commerce app. The non-open source turnkey solutions that I've seen either aren't very flexible or aren't very turnkey.

There are lots of tools to implement a web site, both open and closed: Apache, PHP, serverlets, Cold Fusion, whatever you need. There are lots of ways to implement a shopping cart, with or without cookies - you don't need a solution, just a bit of web savvy.

The back end: credit card validation, payment, merchant accounting - these things can never and will never have an open source solution. To do any of these things is not a matter of code, it's a matter of dealing with a bank or credit card organisation.

CyberCash and Bell Emergis (just to name two) are offering for a fee just such backend access. It will probably always be that way. If you have an account or access to someone like that, you can do all the rest using open source solutions.