|
A small amount of money used to buy
goods or services over the internet. Micropayment systems are designed to allow content
to be purchased in small quantities--one magazine article, say, or a single
track from a cd- without the need to supply credit-card details for
every transaction. Instead, an e-wallet on the buyer's pc
transfers the requisite sum of money to the vendor in token form, and the
vendor later reclaims the actual cash from a third-party bank.
This
form of e-cash is secure and convenient, but micropayments have not yet
become popular with sellers of information. There is, as yet, no killer
app or trend-setting model, and many developers of micropayment
technology are moving into other areas of e-commerce. One problem with
micropayments is keeping the cost of performing the transaction lower than
the cost of performing the transaction lower than the cost of the goods
being exchanged. A bigger stumbling block is the subscription-based model
that has become widely adopted among websites for text-based
services, especially in the United States. The money obtained from
credit-card-based transactions and advertising sales is a more
reliable source of revenue than an unpredictable stream of buyers each
paying a few cents for content. In Europe, where credit cards are not as
strongly entrenched, micropayments may have a rosier future. |
