'Net Features : digital goods

Selling Digital Goods on Magento

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:30:00 GMT

Marketers have one more reason to take a look at Magento. The platform has partnered with ifeelgoods, a service which offers brands and retailers the ability to offer digital goods such as Facebook Credits or Skype minutes as incentives for customer actions including purchases, registrations and social media engagement.

"In digital goods, marketers have found a new strategy that lowers their costs, increases conversions and creates social media engagement," Bob Schwartz, President of Magento said. "Ifeelgoods has developed a product that makes it easy for retailers and brands to enjoy the benefits of this new and innovative approach to marketing."

There are clearly a lot of benefits to offering incentives in exchange for user activity. For example, advertisers could increase CTR and improve cost performance by offering digital goods/freebies. It’s not difficult to see that it could help in spurring virality and engagement in social media and apps. Plus, it adds a layer of “gamification” when done well which can only benefit the shopping and buying experience – something (gamification) which is certainly on the minds of advertisers, retailers and publishers – everyone.

Mazooma Introduces Micropay-in-a-Box

Linc Wonham — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

With 25-percent year-over-year growth, digital content is currently the fastest-growing sector of e-commerce. That rate of growth is driving a significant increase in small-ticket transaction volumes, but merchants that sell digital books, videos, music and games are underserved by traditional payment options.

Mazooma, however, has a new micropay solution that aims to fill this void, enabling merchants to sell these goods faster, safer and more cost-effectively. An online banking-based payment solutions provider, Mazooma connects consumers directly to their bank accounts from the merchant’s checkout page, enabling secure, instant payments for online purchases.

Mazooma’s new micropay-in-a-box solution has as much as a 71-percent reduction in merchant fees for digital content merchants. The solution is available to Discover’s direct merchants using the Centinel Universal Merchant Platform through CardinalCommerce Corporation.

Merchants using Centinel can place the Mazooma payment button on their checkout pages to support a new payment option that enables consumers to pay using their online banking accounts. There is no implementation required for these merchants and no changes to existing settlements and reporting from Discover.

Other features of Mazooma’s micropay solution include a processing fee of 1.5 percent + $0.05 per transaction without the need to aggregate transactions, and a streamlined checkout in two clicks, with no offline sign-up process.

Digital Goods Payments from PayPal

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:39:00 GMT

PayPal announced today that in late fall of this year it will be unveiling a payment solution for digital goods. Application developers and content publishers have waited a long, long time for a frictionless micro-payment option from PayPal and it's finally on its way.

Pricing for the new solution is 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under 12$ - lower than many other payment processors in the digital goods industry.

What's even more noteworthy is that at PayPal’s annual Innovate developer conference, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that Facebook will integrate PayPal’s new digital goods payment flow to make PayPal the way to make purchases on Facebook. Several additional companies, including Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream announced that they are also using PayPal to monetize the growing opportunity in digital goods.

“The decision to purchase digital goods and content usually happens on impulse, so the act of paying needs to be as quick as that impulse,” said Sam Shrauger, PayPal’s vice president of global product strategy. “PayPal for digital goods is an ideal solution for game developers, newspapers, bloggers, media companies, and anyone who is looking to monetize premium digital content around the globe.”