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You can connect PayPal to your bank without a credit or debit card, so yes, they can be out of the equation if the consumer wants to. I don't think PayPal or ca
by vortico 9y ago
You can connect PayPal to your bank without a credit or debit card, so yes, they can be out of the equation if the consumer wants to.
I don't think PayPal or card fees are significant in this discussion of micropayments. The issue of micropayments is getting people to pay at all, either 0% or 100%. A 3% detail doesn't have a huge effect on why they aren't commonly used.
- jenscow 9y agoYes. The jump from $0 to $0.05 is greater than from $0.05 to $1.
- alexasmyths 9y ago"A 3% detail doesn't have a huge effect on why they aren't commonly used." At brick and mortars, where they are operating on 5% margins in many cases, a 3% skim off the top is massive. A 3% arbitrary fee for every electronic payment in north America is really, really quite a huge thing. It's quite massive form of rent extraction, given that there is no real IP, and the actual cost is almost nothing. It's one of the biggest and juiciest forms of obvious oligarchy/monopoly that there is.
- vortico 9y agoRight, totally agree, but this is not the reason that micropayments is not more commonplace. It's equally difficult to get people to log into a payment system to pay $1.40 vs $1.55.
- alexasmyths 9y agoThe micropayments are not there because of the minimum charge on VISA transactions of about 25 cents.
- vortico 9y agoI already mentioned two ways around this, which is why your argument is void: Holding small amounts in PayPal (or similar) accounts, and bypassing cards entirely and using bank routing transactions. Both are solved technical problems.