Micropayments are still a Pain in the Ass!
All this while, I was under the impression that someone figured out a decent way to do micropayments online. Well, I was wrong.
I see the paypal “Donate now” buttons on many blogs and thought paypal offered a decent micropayment system. When I finally got the first buck, paypal said it needs 30¢ for the Credit card transaction and it will also change me 2% of the amount. So I finally got 0.67¢ in hand. Now that’s insane. I am not going to pay paypal 33% of the money I make. What are the alternatives ?
The rest of them suffer with the same above issues as well. I guess I’ll have to wait couple more years for someone to come out with a decent micropayment system.
And don’t forget that you need to pay 30% of your earnings as tax to GoI!
BTW.. what/where are you collecting micropayments (for) ?
http://kalyanvarma.net/photography/
You mean, you really get some donations at all?
In case you didn’t know… the latest RBI/GoI regulations allow Indian Nationals to hold foreign currency accounts/credit cards both in India and Overseas.
Maybe next time you go abroad you should get yourself an account with an Amazon compatible debit card.
Paypal isn’t an ideal solution, by a huge margin. Particularly, look at:
http://www.paypalsucks.com
http://www.paypalwarning.com
While some stories may be exaggerated, there seems to be a lot of trouble with it.
paypal’s not bad
30 cents per transaction and 2% of the amount is not bad at all, i sold all my textbooks online, a better deal than getting ripped off at the bookstore,
I got a paypal donation for msnp. I don’t remember how much I was charged, etc., but I always thought I could just reuse the money to buy stuff online and minimise the amount that goes to paypal.
But how do you maintain it? I had a BoA account that required me to have money in the account to keep it open.
sorry dude …
i actually transferred from my ‘reserve’ amt & that shouldnt accrue any charge to u unless u get a card pymt. i guess it should be the ‘cross border’ fee. As long as u dont withdraw the amt n keep rotating its pretty cool! Paypal is grt in many ways, it almost revolutionised the way 2 completely disparate non-copmmercial entities xchange money. No wonder ebay has got its brains behind it n attributes much of its success to paypal. Sad but true – baazee sucks big time coz it still lacks a a thirdParty pymmt solution.(n thnks to our postal system, even a sw engineer in india thnks 1024 times to buy anything online!!!)
btw yahoo india , what r u waiting 4? Time to launch a product…
Yup.. you need to keep money in it to keep it open here too! (Don’t know any bank that allows a zero-balance for a regular INR account either)
HDFC has one for indivuduals[details]
ICICI also allows businesses to have a foreign exchange account [details]
Why would you need an account with no money anyways?
No, what I was trying to ask was, how do you regularly get money into and out of the account? You can take money out via the check card, but inwards? Paypal’s transaction charges are high.
Kallu’s post seemed to suggest that the Amazon Honour System is better… and that they only accept american cards/checking accounts.. that’s what I was responding to.
start one yourself
yeah! atleast in india there is big market for small donations.
think of it a hundred collection centres all over bangalore collecting money the way you collect phone co bills, just take a note or cheque, write the id of the recipient and drop it in! your company look at the id on th note and forwards it to the recipent in case the net value is more than postage. Or start a sms to charity site ie you sms the id and amount to a sms number provided by your mobile operator and he adds it to your bill, crediting the cahrity in one go at the end o the with the total cash collected. Hell! if it were the dot com days you could start something to compete with paypal in a jiffy.
Where?