Though I am out of work, and pinching pennies, I'm not seriously asking for your hard earned cash. I put the box on the site for three reasons. First, I think an effective mechanism for micropayments is an essential enabling technology for all sorts of cool Internet commerce (and non-commercial) ideas. Second, I have been trying to tempt my friends into co-authoring this blog, and I told them they could split the proceeds from the "paybox" equally - if they would only post. Finally, the Amazon Honor System allows me to insert humorous sayings all along your way through to actually making a payment. You can click on the box below, and see the first of those statements for free. If you are willing to throw away a buck, you can see the second statement, and you will receive a humorous email from yours truly. One dollar is the minimum, so by all means, give twenty. 8)
On any payment, Amazon takes 15% plus 15 cents. So for a dollar donation, the site will net 70 cents. This currently doesn't have to be further split up, since no one else has posted. Still, I'm not sure if this the whiz-bang enabling micropayment system I had in mind, with that kind of overhead. Sure, sure, credit cards charge more, and their minimums are a lot higher. But these rates are a hangover from the days when transaction costs actually represented a higher percentage of the rates such instruments charged. It is possible with today's Internet to lower the costs to nearly zero, I'm convinced, leaving the rest as pure profit for the intermediary. Thus one could charge a much smaller percentage, and enable much smaller payments, while making up the difference and more in increased volume. Alas, no competitor implementing this approach is likely to arise until demand recovers from the crash.
Posted by hbo at July 28, 2003 11:28 PM