Whatever Happened to Micropayments?

prostoalex writes "Remember Flooz? Or Beenz? With a few notable successes (PayPal, and that's about it) online micropayment industry is saving its success stories for future generations. New York Times reports about two nascent micropayment systems, one coming out of Stanford, one out of MIT, that are supposed to help the content producers and Internet users to engage in less-than-a-dollar financial transactions without huge overhead costs, so typical of credit card payments. BitPass requires you to purchase a virtual debit card with a certain amount on it to pay for products and services, and PepperCoin consolidates numerous micropayments into one bill that is then split between the content providers that managed to sell their product to the Internet user." I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.

Comments

Paypal's success was based on $10 free/eBay

[adzoox]

It's not that Paypal is/was the only success, it's that they hooked everyone with free money and low fees. Since they had "other" (read as offshore gambling) sources of income and HUGE DeutcheBank investment + very lucky for the moment, stock market returns that allowed them to beat out competition. (eCount, PayMe, and there was another that skips my mind, that I used, that was really really good.)

Paypal also had a lot of marketting muscle and a catchy name.

To top this off, Paypal also started to guaranty their purchases.

It also ended up being the way that Paypal was used for other payment services because of the debit card that allowed it to prosper. I would for instance use my Paypal card to pay Billpoint or PayDirect if it was offered. This would get me 1.5% back.

StormPay and C2it are the services frauds use. Bidpay is reasonable, but never use it to pay for anything just to be paid.

The author misses Paydirect, which controls Yahoo payments. This is a decent service and is in some ways a superior "eshopping cart" service. Many small websites or discount hardware websites use Yahoo stores and the PayDirect service.

I do agree with the author that "penny payments will revolutionize the internet though" - I see the internet broadband/wifi/otherwise being free in most cases within 10 years. I see ISPs as selling "credit cards" rather than subscriptions. These cards would allow you to send and receive email and view websites. The ISPs in turn act as a bank for websites such as Slashdot. Paying them for the number of views that have crossed their service say 1/100th of a cent for every page view.

I think email should cost 1 cent to send, 1 cent to receive. I think it should be 1 penny each page/email view or bulk 1000/100MB /views for $1 -- 10,000/ MB/ views $10 -- 100,000/MB / views $50 - therefore sites that want to remain free can, sites that want to charge can almost transparently.

What about non-virtual 'micropayments'

[MarcQuadra]

I've started leaving the spare change when I buy little stuff like coffee, takeout food, and trinkets at small shops. Imagine what would happen to the economy if everybody left their 37 cents after buying coffe? The people working minimum-wage at the coffee shops would be making over $30/hour! I think 'micropayments' in real life (not online) could seriously revolutionize the economy, it would finally give the poorest amongst us the ability to make decent (and tax-free) earnings.

Re:Missing the Obvious

[araven]

THANK YOU! It is obvious, and it's been a problem for a while now. Online transactions aren't the only problem. We have a plastic currency society now, paper money is all but obsolete (though IMHO there will always be a place for it). In order to function now, it is arguably necessary to have a credit or debit card, yet private companies control who can and can't have one, and on what terms. It's just the same as if one person could use a $20 bill free of charge because they're "good" at using money, but another person had to pay $1 out of every $20 to someone else because they're "bad" at using money, and then there's the person who simply isn't allowed to use money at all because he doesn't have much to start with and he's been very bad at using it correctly in the past!

Governments should absolutely be moving with the times and providing transaction-fee-free plastic money and online money. Currency should be as neutral and transparent as possible, in order to facilitate a smooth and efficient marketplace. We've always supported the overhead required to create and manage the paper money, we should do the same for modern currency.

~

All micropayments are not created equal.

[Dan Crash]

The big problem with Shirky's analysis is that he makes no distinction between payments of, say, half a cent, and payments of a dollar or more. And that's a major flaw in his argument.

In the real world, Shirky's argument translates to: "No one will buy a candy bar for 50 cents because they will be paralyzed by the user overhead." And, of course, we know this wrong. The candy industry (just to give an example) makes millions of dollars of profit a year selling 50 cent candy bars.

Likewise, there is a legitimate zone of value for digital content that falls between a dime and a couple bucks. 50 cents for an online comic you like, or for a song from a band you want to support, isn't any different than 50 cents for a candy bar.

Micropayments are just payments. And I think it'll be funny if, in a couple years, the artists and writers and bands who are making money off of micropayments can read Clay's article and have a good laugh.

How does Apple handle $0.99 music store payments?

[dpbsmith]

I've been wondering about this since it opened... and I haven't had my account long enough to find out for myself. Maybe $0.99 isn't a micropayment, but it certainly is a minipayment.

I've been hearing for years that the cost of handling credit card payments makes it impractical to use it for purchases of less than about $10. So how does Apple do this?

Certainly a big appeal of the Music Store is that you pay only for what you use and are NOT saddled with an automatic $5.95 or $8.95 per month.

Do they batch them? Do they actually lose money on someone who only buys one song a month, and gamble that most users will buy more than that?

Re:Missing the Obvious

[enjo13]

The overhead of paper money is FAR less than plastic. Money is made and released, and the governments obligation ends there.

With plastic the government has to become a bank (the money the card represents has to be managed by somebody). This implies that people have the ability to get money into the bank (direct deposite, tellers, etc..). That's big money right there.

Then there is the question of fraud.. with money there is no question. Posession almost entirely determines ownership of paper money. When someone robs you, it is a criminal matter. However, if you don't catch the crook you don't get the money back. With plastic fraud is much easier to get away with (you just need a number after all), and so government has to support THAT as well.

So the government is going to have to get into the banking business... which is not something I beleive it should stick it's nose in. Let it make the currency, leave it to the private sector to manage that currency.

Simple reason why micropayments are bunk

[Rogerborg]

When you contest payment with your bank, what happens? Well, you talk to an actual live human being, who will do actual human things, and make a decision on whether to refund you the money and whether to prosecute a third party. And your transaction fees pay his salary.

What happens when you contest something with PayPal? You drop them an email (good luck trying to talk to anyone), and then they freeze your account, sieze (i.e. spend) your money, and (if they're feeling particularly communicative) tell you to go screw yourself. They do that not because they're evil (although they probably are) but because they simply don't make enough margin on their transactions to be able to afford to investigate them, and because they know that it's not worth anyone's time to sue them, even in small claims court, for the contested amounts.

Now, when the transaction value drops to 1 cent, what's the best case margin on that? You've got purchase and maintenance costs on your servers and database, plus bandwidth costs for those 128bit SSL encrypted transaction details that fly both ways. Half a cent? More if you handle a lot. A loss if you don't handle enough to amortize your setup costs.

Now, how many fraudulent transactions do you have to have - from a single source - before it's worth taking any action? It costs ten cents for a staffer to click on a button, so you're talking twenty transactions. If the staffer has to think at all, it's a hundred. If they have to do any investigatation at all - for example, to decide if a bunch of transactions are from a single source - it's thousands. If you want to hand it over to a lawyer or other third party, it's tens or hundreds of thousands.

But that's fantasy land, because it's not worth even recording the details of the transaction that would allow you to decide if it was fraudulent or not. The logs themslves would take a huge chunk out of your profit. You'd simply have to trust the referrer.

Well, that's not working out too well for credit cards right now, but at least cc issuers can pass back all the costs to online retailers for credit card fraud.

But if it's not worth your while even retaining transaction records for micropayments, or to investigate fraud after the fact, how are you going to protect themselves from fraud?

I suspect that you're not. It comes down to the equation of whether it's worth anyone's time to crack the system. Well, as thousands of open source projects, white hat hobbyist hackers, and karma systems show, lots of people don't put a dollar value on their time. And given that the chances of being caught are minimal, well, why not give it a go? After all, it's only avoiding a penny a time. Who can that hurt?

Any popular micropayment system will (I suggest) be defrauded, and the costs will come right out of the payment backer's pocket. We've seen how PayPal deals with that; ignore it. Don't answer the 'phones. Freeze the account, and spend the money in it. With micropayments, who's going to even bother complaining? And if they do, how much are they going to have in their account? $5? It's barely even worthwhile seizing that, and not worthwhile at all if you have to send or even read a letter.

There is simply no compelling reason for anyone to manage micropayments, other than as a tool of desperation to prop up a flagging or non-existent business model (*cough* slashdot *cough*). There's precious little profit to be made from it, and a lot of opportunity to be scammed so badly that you won't even realise that you're bankrupt until you total the figures at the end of the year and find out that most of your payments came from Mr M. Mouse.

I suspect that it's good old fashioned economics that are stopping any of the big financial institutions from implementing mi