The hard problem with micropayments is that if your site sells access or content to individual users for micropayments, and you have users in multiple countries

The hard problem with micropayments is that if your site sells access or content to individual users for micropayments, and you have users in multiple countries or multiple states/provinces within a country, you might have to deal with VAT or sales tax on those payments in multiple jurisdictions. For direct micropayments to work for sites that have users in multiple jurisdictions and do not wish to find themselves on the wrong side of the law in those jurisdictions one of these approaches is probably needed: 1. Some sort of international agreement to either make it so online sales of digital content is just taxed in the seller's jurisdiction. 2. Some sort of international agreement that makes it so that even if the seller has to collect taxes for multiple jurisdictions, they can report and remit all of the collected taxes to one jurisdiction and that jurisdiction's tax office will deal with divvying it up to the others. Europe does something like that for VAT. You register with one EU country (Ireland is a good choice for US companies). Then you just send them a quarterly report with a list of how much you sold in each country and pay them and they deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax authorities in any other EU countries. Another approach, which does not require any new international agreements to be made, is for sites to sell through an intermediary. You structure this so that the end user actually buys from the intermediary, and the intermediary buys from your site. If the intermediary is handling many different sites they might be big enough that they can afford the cost of dealing with sales/VAT taxes in potentially hundreds of different jurisdictions. Your site is only transacting with the intermediary and so only has to worry about at most two jurisdictions, the one you are in and the one the intermediary is in.