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Buyers' Guide to
Online Payment Acceptance
Chapter 3: Micropayments
& Digital Cash
My
recommendation is to stay away from these
services for now. They still have not caught on
with the public. However we have put them in this
guide due to the enormous amount of hype that
surrounds them, and in time they will become a
viable method of accepting payment online.
The concept of Digital Cash systems is that a
person fills up a digital wallet from a credit
card. They then get to spend that money either
via a digital wallet program running on their
computer, or via a special PIN number. The future
of these systems is in micro-transactions
(Micropayments), say 5 or 10 cents to read an
article or a page. At the present time charging
people a few pennies for viewing content is
impractical. Hopefully Digital Cash will solve
this problem in a few years. Another downside to
Digital Cash is the fact that only a small number
of merchants actually allow for this type of
payment acceptance. It's not even close to being
as common as regular credit card acceptance.
At the moment, some of the biggest Digital Cash
service companies are:
RocketCash
InternetCash
Echarge
Micropayments have been around for quite some
time, but aren't as widely used by online
merchants. This has caused several micropayment
service companies to close up or halt further
marketing of their services until usage
increases. As previously discussed, micropayments
are good for sites that offer online products
(documents, music files, etc.) that only cost a
few cents up to $10. Micropayment solutions work
the same as typical credit card acceptance except
that the amount taken per transaction is much
smaller, thus you get to keep more of the profit.
If a Micropayment service is what your company
needs check out these sites:
eTelCharge - Adds charges to your
phone bill
iPin - Puts charges on your
ISP (Internet Service Provider) bill
microCreditCard
Cardis - Click "The
Ultimus Solution" button once on their
website
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