Purchases can also be made in tiny increments, which makes it an ideal vehicle for micropayments. If Microsoft can successfully link its smart card business to its increasingly popular Windows suite of programs, then micropayments may be able to reach a critical enough mass for network effects to begin. Once smart cards are established as a common mode of payment, micropayment technology will succeed or fail based on business strategy rather than barriers to entry. Choice and quality are key to micropayment’s success in the downloading of individual works. Differential viewing schemes offer great promise for micropayments if customers are guaranteed that they can rely on the quality and relevance of articles for which they are paying. With trusted systems in place one could envision a pay-per-print system, which eliminates the risk that makes consumers wary about paying for information the may not be able to use.
Users could search to their heart’s content to find useful articles, and even read them online, but to print or save the file a viewer would have to make a 10 cent micropayment. Done in large volumes this could net significant returns for online publications. As more and more users turn to the Web as their primary source of news information one can expect a shift away from libraries and other traditional research venues to the convenience of a low cost alternative at home. All of these companies tried to bring a cash equivalent to the Internet.
However, Litan advises enterprise clients to stick to pilots for now, and tells them that they should expect to wait perhaps two to three years to implement production micropayment systems. In the late 90s, IBM’s Micro Payments was set up with the aim to allow vendors and merchants to sell content, information as well as services over the Internet for minimal amounts as low as one cent. Another attempt to make this model work was translated into the inception of iPin, a venture-capital-funded startup allowing purchasers to include incremental micropayment charges to their existing bill for Internet services. Going further than Kelly, Michael Goldhaber argues that “”the currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention,”” and therefore businesses should focus on eyes rather than dollars if they want to succeed on the Web.
Petty cash is a small amount of cash on hand used for paying expenses too small to merit writing a check. As the freelancer gets more jobs, Upwork racks up IOUs until the wallet holds a large amount of say, $1,000. At this point, Upwork makes the 휴대폰결제현금화 to the freelancer’s account. Jake Frankenfield is an experienced writer on a wide range of business news topics and his work has been featured on Investopedia and The New York Times among others.
Another flaw with micropayments is that frequent customers are penalized for their patronage when they pay to play. This can be eliminated by offering a variety of payment schemes, but doing so would lessen any unique effect micropayments might have on the structure and content of the Internet. These technological efforts are seeing consumers’ costs diminish to as low as a few cents. The problem with such low fees is that they may not feasibly be processable through credit card companies and their traditional transaction fee-based system.
