Online payment company PayPal has opened up its micropayment solution to “game developers, media publishers, or anyone interested in selling digital content on a global scale.” The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer “a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12.”
Today, PayPal’s two-click micropayment solution has gone public and it has the potential to change how publishers and other online merchants interact with their customers.
The major hurdle for micropayments is getting the consumer through the process with as little friction as possible. The more a consumer has to do to make a payment, the less likely they are to do so. This is PayPal’s answer to that problem.
When consumers pay for online content, PayPal for digital goods allows them to pay in as little as two clicks without ever leaving a publisher’s game, news, music, video or media site. It’s the online equivalent to dropping a quarter in the slot to buy a gumball.
Based on PayPal’s existing security, the service offers a faster, safer and more cost-effective way to send and receive micropayments. PayPal for digital goods still has competitive fees for micropayments pricing of 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12. This is actually lower than fees typically charged by payment processors in the DG industry. As an extra perk, publishers and merchants are paid automatically and given immediate access to their funds, every time a customer purchases digital goods.
So, how could this change things? The digital publishing space is on a never ending search for a way to get readers to pay for content on an a la carte basis. According to PayPal, online magazine Autosport.com saw a 75% increase in new customers signing up with the beta version of the micropayment system.
The next step, of course, is to do what’s shown in the screen shot above – get users to pay for things 25 cents at a time.
