MACRO-Payment alternatives

Post by **Greg Stephens** » Mon Jul 09, 2001 2:46 pm

There's <a href="http://www.paypal.com">Paypal</a>, <a href="http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/ ... ">Amazon's honor system</a> and today I discovered that <a href="https://www.moneyzap.com/application/main.asp">Western Union</a> supports online money transactions as well.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Jul 17, 2001 9:44 am

I am on AOL. Yesterday I go a popup ad asking
me to sign up for a new AOL online payment
system by which I can send money to any email
account in the USA. But they refuse to say
anything about fees before I sign up, so I
have not signed up.

John2two · Post by **John2two** » Wed Jul 18, 2001 8:30 am

In addition to the PayPal, Amazon, and Western Union options Greg listed, my/our <a href="http://cmug.com/~john_scott/ic/microtab ... comparison table</a> also lists BillPoint and PayDirect in this market. Opportunities abound there for you nice people to chase down additional facts so that the table can be an even more useful reference tool for us all.

John

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Jul 20, 2001 4:46 pm

(anonymous Sean)

Well, I did my good deed and picked a random entry from the table to fill out. Looks like cjs picked the same one, heh. Interesting to see the discrepencies.

Anyway, it only took me somewhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes to write it up (reading through their FAQ and manual, probably about 10 web pages), so you readers out there, hop to it and do one yourself.

cjstone · Post by **cjstone** » Mon Jul 23, 2001 2:36 pm

About Javien in your table:

Yeah, we musta went to different Javien sites. Yeah, maybe they've got two sites, and they sniff your browser and serve up different ones. Yeah, it's all a disinformation campaign by The Zurich Gnomes to keep micropayments out of the picture!

Time for my medication already? Really? Boy, the day really goes by fast on that stuff.

cjs

buzzard · Post by **buzzard** » Sun Aug 12, 2001 1:55 am

For selling tangibles, http://www.ccnow.com provides a credit card sales service for which they charge 9% regardless of the product price--however, it requires selling a tangible product.

I logged on to check, and the product price can be set as low as $1. So it's not a micropayment, by far, but it's quite a bit less overhead than paypal (which has a minimum 30 cent overhead, I think). So it's just interesting data to see what is theoretically possible for a company to achieve. (Although maybe ccnow takes a loss on those, or has additional overhead charges on low-cost items--I didn't actually try buying anything.)

ragtag · Post by **ragtag** » Sun Aug 12, 2001 2:08 pm

Thanx for pointing out CCnow....I've been browsing their site, and it looks like a good option for those selling tangible products on the web.

I'm curious if anyone here has any experience with selling tangible objects (comics) on the web? Does it work? Did you use CCnow or a similar system, or had your own merchants account?

Ragnar

John2two · Post by **John2two** » Mon Aug 13, 2001 10:08 pm

So Buzzard and Ragnar, either of you kind folks want to profile ccnow for inclusion in <a href="http://cmug.com/~john_scott/ic/microtable.html">the micropayment comparison table</a>?

John

buzzard · Post by **buzzard** » Tue Aug 14, 2001 9:59 pm

Well, since it's tangibles only, I didn't think it was really appropriate to throw it in. I just thought it was interesting that their overhead on $1 is only 9 cents (as far as I can tell without actually buying something).

If you <i>really</i> want it I can crank through it.

John2two · Post by **John2two** » Fri Aug 17, 2001 8:47 am

The entire macro group that is already in the table are admittedly off-topic to the main point of the table.

(Hmmm, maybe I should separate them out into a separate "Macro, not Micro" table, in preparation for the next inevitable flame war when doofuses around the world rise up to post the brilliant insight "I'm against the idea of micropayments 'cause I don't want to go to Amazon and pay a dollar every time I want to look at a comic.")

Anyhow, I think my point was that there are lots of offerings listed in the table that are inappropriate for webcomics in one way or another. In fact, *all* of them are inappropriate to greater and lesser degrees. If there was a real, workable micro system, we'd all be flocking to it, at least to investigate it.

So, yeah, if it would hurt you too much, I think it would just barely worth doing to add ccnow to the table.

John