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I happen to be working on a micropayment strategy and implementation for my day job (we're content producers in this scenario) but we're US based. I am curious

by spokey 17y ago

I happen to be working on a micropayment strategy and implementation for my day job (we're content producers in this scenario) but we're US based. I am curious to know more about the micropayment problem your startup is solving. The technical issues--transactional processing, account management, integration with the web experience, etc.--aren't trivial but they are relatively straightforward. The harder nut to crack seems to be the social issue: Customers don't want to break out a credit card for a $0.01 purchase, so you need some sort of digital wallet or debit account to deduct from. Yet there is no "digital wallet" service with broad enough acceptance to assume that your (or at least my) average customer will have one. The chicken-and-egg problem seems to be a challenge: Sellers won't offer the digital wallet payment option if there aren't existing customers. Customers won't sign up for a digital wallet if there aren't sellers who use it. Are you doing anything to address this side of the problem?

ulf 17y ago
You raise some very valid points, most of which we also identified as key questions to our enterprise. As to the social issue: we anticipate the chicken-egg problem on an even broader scale. Our target group are not companies who already do sell a lot online, but the ones who did not even start doing so, missing a suitable solution to acquire payments. So we focus on projects where the direct selling of goods or services starts from the ground, which we expect to work to our advantage, in regard to convincing companies of using our service, even without an exisiting customer base. We will not pursue the customers directly at first, and concentrate on finding partners for integration. These will be probably startups themselves, willing to try unorthodox methods to get ahead. In regard to the digital wallet, our strategy is to aggregate the most important existing payment services to allow charging of accounts. With suitable integration, this de facto pre-paid approach can be turned into a nearly-instant experience for the customer.

by spokey 17y ago

ulf 17y ago

You raise some very valid points, most of which we also identified as key questions to our enterprise. As to the social issue: we anticipate the chicken-egg problem on an even broader scale. Our target group are not companies who already do sell a lot online, but the ones who did not even start doing so, missing a suitable solution to acquire payments. So we focus on projects where the direct selling of goods or services starts from the ground, which we expect to work to our advantage, in regard to convincing companies of using our service, even without an exisiting customer base. We will not pursue the customers directly at first, and concentrate on finding partners for integration. These will be probably startups themselves, willing to try unorthodox methods to get ahead. In regard to the digital wallet, our strategy is to aggregate the most important existing payment services to allow charging of accounts. With suitable integration, this de facto pre-paid approach can be turned into a nearly-instant experience for the customer.