Forum Moderators: phranque
My product costs $.75.
Thanks!
I'm also looking for good micropayment providers!
It looks like it might actually work, but I need more details.
Peppercoin is based on cryptography, digital certificates, and clever mathematical algorithms working in concert to efficiently process payments and ensure security and fairness.
Do you ship your 75 cent product or is it digital?
I fear you're ahead of your time. Even at 99 cents a song and plenty of infrastructure to spread costs around on, Apple can't make money.
What the dirty pictures folks did was package up services--subscriptions. A month, or a pack of 12. Reports this is working fine for them, but then that's more in the nature of their product.
The news archive pros tell me that you can't really cover all of your costs at less than $10, and they have done just about everything they can to reduce their costs, too.
You give the customer a service number where they can send an SMS with a special key in the text. The price for this can vary from around 30c to 3$. The SMS service provider you work with then sends you a notification, and you can return a message with a code you generate. The customer copies the code into a form on your web site and you know they have paid.
Advantages:
- Simple. Everybody understands how to send an SMS, and even old farts like me have a mobile phone nowadays.
- Fast. Well, at least usually. The SMS networks can sometimes (rarely) delay messages for several hours.
- Reliable. It is rare (but happens) that SMS messages get lost before they reach you.
- Anonymous. You don't need the customer's name and address, all you'll see is a phone number (if at all).
- No chargebacks. You can't reverse such a transaction, which makes it ideal for digitally delivered goods.
Disadvantages:
- Costs. That's a problem all micropayments have in common. Typically, you'll only see about 50% of the money the customer pays.
- Media switch. The customer has to move back and forth between two media (www and mobile phone), which may confuse some.
- Many hands involved. The transaction goes through many hands (phone company, SMS node, SMS service provider, etc.) before it reaches you. This means that if something goes wrong along the way (message lost), you can't do anything to help your customers about it.
People have been paying per Premium SMS for ringtones, wallpapers, and other gimmicks on their phones for a while. They are now increasingly using them to pay for online stuff as well. If you audience is young, then that's definitively something to investigate.
