I have been working on a new web application that will be accepting micropayments (typically a $1) and I am not sure which payment provider to go with. It looks like in most cases my $1 profit is being stripped of 30 cents or more depending on the provider. I know Paypal has been the de facto standard, but has anyone faired out well with Google or Amazon?
I don't like Paypal but you can't beat the price:
<a href="https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/wp_pro&nav=2.1.1" rel="nofollow">https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...</a><p>Click on 'Pricing' then scroll down and expand 'Micropayments'<p>It's 5% + $0.05. So for your $1 in revenue only $0.10 is taken by Paypal.
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033180" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033180</a> referred to this a while back.<p>centipaid.com talked about having a scaleable micropayment solution.<p>However, almost any solution requires one to have money 'in the system' and earn/spend the micropayments, and pay a fee to take it out or put money in. There are a number of other providers that do this through stored value Mastercards, etc, but, those fees sometimes become prohibitive.<p>The way I've seen a number of companies handle micropayments was to keep the money in the system, but, you couldn't get it released without earning $25 which kept administrative costs to a minimum. You had to fund the account, but, if you didn't spend it all, you couldn't get it back. Facebook credits work in a similar manner - one purchases $x of credits, then can spend those coins on various apps.
I also want to mention that I see Paypal and Amazon accounting for this, but they are doing it in a way that it hurts you to use it on all transactions over $10-12. In my case this could happen if someone did bulk buying. How would you model this out in a test environment, so you kind of knew what to expect?
Definitely PayPal. Not only should you be able to get 5% + 5c, it also is just rolling out a much better UX for digital goods and more importantly has 200+ miliion ready to pay.