Micropayments pop up again

Peppercoin 2.0 reduces cost to 10 cents

[amznVibe]

Peppercoin 2.0 [corp.peppercoin.com] has made the mainstream news with their micropayment offers Yahoo Article [news.yahoo.com].

The biggest obstacle to using credit cards for micropayments is the cost of transaction processing. Typically, a transaction costs 20 cents to a quarter, plus 2 percent to 3 percent of the price of the item being sold. For very inexpensive products, the transaction expense can wipe out any profit.

Peppercoin 2.0 has reduced the transaction expense to less than 10 cents, Solomon said

Micropayments have been talked about briefly on WW world before [google.com]
and visit the W3C "graveyard" of micropayments [w3.org]

[blaze]

I think the big problem with this space isn't the cost of transactions, but the security cost.

With 10$+ transactions, you'll take the time to make sure you are securely entering your cc #. But if you do 50 20c transactions, will you check them all?

[Sanenet]

There's a good one over here in Europe, based on SMS. Send a message, get charged €0.50 and get a password back.

Haven't seen many sites using it tho'.

[Morgenhund]

The main problem with these SMS is that usually it is not possible to send them (i.e. pay with them) from abroad. It actually kills the true borderless nature of E-Commerce.

[HughMungus]

I think the big problem with this space isn't the cost of transactions, but the security cost.

I've always thought it was the transaction cost. It's like ebay -- you can sell one item that costs $1,000 or you can sell 1,000 items that cost $1. Which is easier?