'Net Features : micropayments

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.”

PayPal May Have a Big Solution for Micropayments

Linc Wonham — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT

The micropayments space – while filled with promise for online businesses and consumers alike – has thus far generated more discussion than results. Friday’s announcement that PayPal intends to launch its own small-transaction payment product by the end of 2010 may change that very quickly.

Already, it is a crowded and competitive arena. Numerous companies are developing solutions for making online transactions for small amounts of money a more viable option for merchants and shoppers. As it is today, most online businesses don’t generate enough profits from such sales to expose themselves to transaction fees from third-party payment systems. Consumers, while increasingly warming to small-scale Internet purchases, are still somewhat reluctant to go through the required steps for items of $10 or less.

But with these low-ticket items becoming an increasingly important part of our online retail economy, the potential for micropayments is anything but small. A number of startups such as Flattr have developed innovative approaches, and Web leaders such as Google, Facebook and Visa have experimented with variations of their own. But, to date, no one has found a solution that completely satisfies both retailer and shopper.

While no specifics are yet known about the new product in development, PayPal vice president Scott Thompson says the company's goal is to make micropayments as seamless as possible for the buyer and the seller. If such a visible presence in the payments industry can find a solution for which others are still searching, micropayments could start to change the economy of the Web at an accelerated rate.

Flipboard Shows Us the Future of Content

Mike Phillips — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:30:00 GMT

A new iPad app was released this week that might indicate a seismic, revolutionary shift in how users perceive and consume content, as well as offer a true silver bullet for a troubled media industry scrambling for ways to generate revenue.

The Flipboard iPad app aggregates all of your chosen social media environments and displays that content in a slick, easy-to-use "personal magazine." Every time the app is launched, your magazine will show articles, images, links and videos that your friends - and presumably you - find interesting. As said in the video demonstration below, "It always has content you care about."

This is the future of content – personalized, engaging and valuable to consumers. It’s not to be taken lightly and will soon go far beyond social media.

Watch the short video below then continue reading as we examine why this is so important to the Web industry.

Implications for Business

Flipboard is a prime example of discretionary content. Users are increasingly (and with greater ease) deciding what they view, how they view it and from whom. As a publisher, this one app highlights major reasons to get involved in or amplify your presence on social media today, and demonstrates why it is so very important to create customized content for users moving forward.

Let's look at this from the user's perspective. If I'm setting up my personal magazine, I could choose to include a favorite Twitter feed, such as @chicagotribune; Facebook Page, such as local radio station WXRT; and my brother's Facebook profile. When I open my Flipboard, I'll see some of the latest breaking news stories complete with accompanying images and video (not just 140 characters with a link) from the Tribune, read about and listen to a sample of a new band coming to town from WXRT, and see video of my niece's first steps taken just seconds ago. That's powerful stuff.

One very important takeaway from all of this is the idea that consumers will start viewing content on a very personal level. That means providing what they want without overwhelming them. Twitter offers one way for publishers to do exactly that. For example, if I run a local news website, I could set up separate Twitter accounts for politics, sports, business, entertainment, etc. Then, a user can pull only those feeds they are interested in to display in their personal magazine. That makes your brand valuable to them without bogging them down with information they don’t need or want.

Also, this new level of personalization requires a sense of social media responsibility. For example, a user will not want their personal magazine littered with duplicate updates or endless retweets. This is about engagement – not clicks or pageviews.

At this point, you might be thinking: that's great but this is one app, on one device. For now, that's true. But Flipboard and the iPad are harbingers of what's to come.

So-called "couch computing" is very real. Soon, the market will be inundated with tablet computers and Flipboard or an alternative will be available for every one of them. Most importantly, this Flipboard style of media consumption is in demand. This one app crashed servers just hours after its release due to the flood of consumers attempting to connect to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I'm comfortable saying that this app or another iteration of it will be one of the most downloaded of all time. And those millions of users will need content to fill it up.

The Big Picture

The Web is a fractured environment - you have to spend a lot of time and energy reading headlines, clicking links, scanning articles, watching videos and reading updates to get what you want. Flipboard shows us that there is another way. There is a way to get everything you want in one place, in an engaging, entertaining way that offers real value. And this is where the media industry as a whole stands to benefit the most.

Remember micropayments - the idea of charging a few cents for a particular piece of content? With Flipboard (or something like it) charging for piecemeal content is a very real possibility. You could view the latest episode of your favorite television show, the business section from The New York Times, the sports page of the Chicago Tribune and see the latest product releases and daily coupons from your favorite retailer (and be able to purchase), all in one place, for a nominal fee.

I don't know about you, but I would pay for that before paying to access one website - as Rupert Murdoch has suggested. Why would I pay for content I'll never read? Instead, why not pay for only the content I want? Back in the day when I still subscribed to a print newspaper, I would rifle through a six-pound Sunday paper to pull small sections out that I wanted to read, then throw the rest away. That was a tremendous waste of time, energy and resources. And we all know what’s happened to the print newspaper business.

If I could open one app and see and hear everything that's important to me? Well, I'd buy that for a dollar. Or more. And, until now, I haven't even mentioned the advertising possibilities.

Payment Plugins for Facebook Apps (Developers)

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:54:00 GMT

Mark my words: Micropayments are going to change the economy - well, at least the micro-economies of social networks.

eBIZ.Mobility announced the availiability of a Facebook payment plugin for its OneTouch Online Purchasing payment processing system. Application developers will be able to monetize Facebook traffic by adding an alternative pyament option into their app offerings. There is a good example here of how it works available on Facebook. There is a downside of course. In order to buy digital content, consumers will need to charge an existing billing account with the participating telecom service provider, prepaid card or bank of their choice. Right now, the options are limited but there is clearly potential in the offering.

According to Jeremy Kagan, eBIZ.mobility's CEO, micropayments are reinventing the online monetization model. "OneTouch Online Purchasing is very excited to be in a position to take full advantage of the micropayment revolution internationally," said Kagan. "More than 70% of Facebook users are based outside the USA, and now every application that's built for Facebook can be quickly and easily monetized worldwide, guaranteeing that any customer anywhere in the world can purchase safely and effortlessly."

If you've got a Facebook app, are you considering adding a paid level? If not, consider this: over 52,000 apps have been added by developers looking to tap into the potential of the social site's 200 million plus audience - and 70% of those users interact with apps.

Sample of how the plugin appears in apps: