Ask HN: Micro-payments

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I was wondering if anyone has experience with trying to setup a payment system that would allow me to accept very small amounts of money, but still be feasible with regards to fees payable to the transaction provider. Many thanks.

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There is one and only one such mechanism that exists, reverse-billed SMS. Even then, the fees payable will often amount to some 25% of the total. What are you going to be selling? If its something you are expecting lots of repeat custom, then you could do as all the music vendors do and aggregate bills over some period of time. Or, if that is a bit too risky sounding for you, have customers charge their accounts up with credit first before shopping.

I'm trying to setup a website that will allow a small community to sell stuff to each other, but to make the whole thing viable I need to figure out a way to take a micro-payment from the seller at the time they upload their listing. I'm not too keen on the SMS model, the aggregate billing option is one that I might end up taking. Just thought that micro-payments would have been a solved issue by now and easy to implement.

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