Slashdot Mirror
PayPal to Offer Micropayments
lazarus corporation writes "According to a press release on shareholder.com, PayPal are introducing micropayments processing fees for digital goods. Will this allow musicians to do away with record companies completely and successfully sell their own music online?" It looks geared to be the under $2 area and not the couple of pennies area, so I think calling it "Micropayments" is a bit much, but it's something. Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
The new fees will enable merchants to process payments at a rate of 5 percent plus 5 cents per transaction.
So for $0.99 it will still take a 10% fee.
Bastards.
BitPass has had micropayments for some time... the catch is you have to buy at least $3 credits, but then you can pay those anonymously to websites in increments as small as one cent.
Paypal just siezed $27,000 of aid going to the Red Cross from SomethingAwful.com users - I'd say thats reason enough to cancel if you haven't already been royally screwed by them...
How long do you think the sites will leave their money sitting on PayPal, though?
I understand that PayPal's solution is quite different from Slashdot's solution; PayPal is banking on $0.50-$2.00 - type transactions and Slashdot is a penny a page. The latter style (CmdrTaco's comment) is what I was talking about.
PayPal may be uniquely positioned to provide such a service, as they already provide some aspects of the needed technology.
As Taco mentioned, though, the real test of "micropayments" is not under $2.00, but rather under $0.10. The markets are likely quite different though. This 5% plus 5 cents could work for a variety of small transactions.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Micropayments were available in the mid to late 1980s on Prestel and Micronet (a British pre-world wide web online service). "Information providers" on Prestel/Micronet could have free pages, or pages that cost money to view from 1 penny and up. In 1986, I was buying and downloading games for my Sinclair Spectrum for a reasonable discount over going to the shop and buying the same game on tape. Multi-user games such as Shades were paid for using micropayments (1 penny increments). You could rent Gallery pages (a bit like making your own home page on the web today) by using this system.
Of course with Prestel/Micronet it was easy since Prestel just added the charges to your bill quarterly. However, there's no reason why PayPal couldn't have done the same for PayPal user to PayPal user transactions since they wouldn't have to interact with any banking institutions to do it, so really it's boo on PayPal for taking so long to actually make this happen.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
About... oh... six or eight years ago, there was a company that was founded which had a great online payment scheme that would handle micropayments without problems. Instead of charging a per-transaction fee, it would make money on the float of withdrawing a larger sum from your bank account, not giving you interest on that ammount, and letting you tap into it whenever. Putting money back in your account that was transferred to you could take a couple of days, since they wanted to earn the float money. The company even had a way to do micropayments by beaming data from PDA to PDA, and were planning on a cell-phone version of the same thing. Eventually, they abandoned this system, abandoned the PDA and cell phone systems, and just about abandoned their customers. They switched to a transaction fee system, got bought by a bank, focused on auction transactions, and eventually were bought by eBay. This company was called PayPal.
They shut down the account without any warning, were not contactable and their automated system for reinstatement did not work.
When they were finally contacted they refused to release the money for 9 days, and stated that as they have an exclusive contract with United Way they can't authorize charity payments to the red cross.
So instead they refunded all the money - *minus* all their transaction fees... so paypal made a nice tidy sum and the people in new orleans got zip.
Nice company.
You have been especially selected for our FREE Apostrophe 101 course.
:)
We recommend that you pay particular attention to module 3...
It's "fees", not "fee's" and "cents" not "cent's". Although you managed to work out how to pluralise "thing", "sale" and "cost" and even "micropayment" correctly.
4 out of 6 plurals correct... Well done, but do try harder next time...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5