What are latest/newest ways to receive online micropayments?

If they're genuinely small items (i.e. £10 or less) I'd recommend:- Cash sent by First Class post, the risk is very small. Cheques

I'm thinking worldwide, though. Suppose I had a short story, a poem, a translation, or a riddle I wanted to sell. People could download it, having read part of it. Just a few pennies per hit would be enough to make thousands potentially. But the payment methods I've come across so far, except PayPal, assume a major, certainly moderate, business enterprise is being set up. The method needs to be as transparent as possible (PayPal requires buyers to sign up first) and accept all major credit cards for very small amounts. That Amazon Honor System sounds totally brilliant, but if it's restricted to US sellers only, it's of no use to me in the UK.

MM

There are other companies other than PayPal - Nochex is one.

In that case you've basically had it, there isn't even any satisfactory way of sending small amounts of money between private individuals in the EU - I know, I've been trying to do it for years.

EuroCheques were a pretty good solution while they were available, there's no effective replacement yet.

There are a couple of credit card facilities on the way which may address the problem but they're not functioning yet.

This is kind of what I thought. Amazing really, when you think how much the internet and web services are hyped. There must be tens of thousands of small, i.e. miniscule, businesses or individuals with stuff they could sell, yet the one thing that should be easy, namely the online equivalent of sticking one's hand in one's pocket to fish out a few pence, is dead hard.

MM

Well of course it's dead hard, it's dead expensive! How much does it cost to clear a credit card? how much does it cost to build an online infrastructure to process millions of payments quickly, securely and efficiently, and you need huge volume to make money? How much does it cost to maintain the backed up financial transaction information for years? How much does it cost to have people responding to fraud complaints?

Cash is a very simple thing compared to a hypothetical online micropayment system?

Jim.

But that doesn't change the economics of it?

Jim.

But without an online equivalent to cash the internet will never be a true marketplace for all, but only for a relatively small number of traders.

MM

Do you think that 'the economics' will preclude forever the kind of micropayments-for-everybody system that I am seeking? Perhaps it's in the interests of the big boys operating at present, whether traders or financial houses, to keep the biggest slice of the pie to themselves for as long as possible. But if thousands of individuals wanted to trade - pictures of their locality, genealogical data from their life history, knitting patterns, songs, poems, short stories, jokes, comic strips, crosswords, adverts, whatever - there would have to be a method of payment that was easy to understand and cheap to run. Since the money system (printing of bills, minting of coins) is run by governments, I see no other way than for the government to take the initiative. If taxes are paid on profits over a certain level, government coffers could benefit. They could also benefit by needing to pay less out in social security, if people were given the way to make money for themselves online.

MM