I am currently founding a startup which deals with acquiring micropayments as low as a single cent. Before launching publicly we are interested in cooperating with a small number of enterprises to establish and maybe customize the process. What we are going to offer is an easy system that lets you sell any kind of stuff to your customers, for prices as low as 1 cent, without having the hassle to maintain account information and so on by yourself. If you would like to integrate such payments easily into your platform or product, feel free to contact me (email in the profile) so we can try to work something out.<p>Disclaimer: We are based in Germany, so while it should not be a problem for anyone in the EU to use our service, we cannot at this moment provide anything for anyone outside Europe.
No. It's a solution in search of a problem. There are plenty of businesses that would like to receive micropayments, but time after time customers have rejected them. Even if you somehow created a system that was absolutely seamless and required zero effort on the part of the user, you'd still have to convince people that they actually want to make micropayments.<p>The trouble is that if you set a price that is <i>very nearly free</i> then you are inevitably competing with <i>actually really free</i>. Dan Ariely's research has shown that customers massively overvalue anything free. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a free good to a good at any price, even when there is a significant difference in quality. No experimenter thus far has managed to break this natural gravity towards free in preference to any price. Add in the inevitable friction of the act of payment and you've got an overwhelming barrier to entry that without fail drives the mass of the market towards free alternatives.<p>There have been a litany of failed micropayment services, all of whom failed for the same reason - rather than doing the Agile thing and finding out what the customer wanted, they tried to impose a 'great idea' on a market that has consistently rejected it. Why exactly are you going to succeed where dozens have failed? What are you going to do differently?<p><a href="http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf</a>
<a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html</a>
I happen to be working on a micropayment strategy and implementation for my day job (we're content producers in this scenario) but we're US based.<p>I am curious to know more about the micropayment problem your startup is solving.<p>The technical issues--transactional processing, account management, integration with the web experience, etc.--aren't trivial but they are relatively straightforward.<p>The harder nut to crack seems to be the social issue: Customers don't want to break out a credit card for a $0.01 purchase, so you need some sort of digital wallet or debit account to deduct from. Yet there is no "digital wallet" service with broad enough acceptance to assume that your (or at least my) average customer will have one.<p>The chicken-and-egg problem seems to be a challenge: Sellers won't offer the digital wallet payment option if there aren't existing customers. Customers won't sign up for a digital wallet if there aren't sellers who use it.<p>Are you doing anything to address this side of the problem?