PayPal has announced that they will now process payments of less than $2. In essence, they’ve simply expanded their pricing scheme to charge differently for payments that are less than $2. However, at rate of 5 percent plus 5 cents per transaction, this really won’t work that well for true micropayments of say $0.05. Micropayments have been bandied about for years, but have never come to fruition as Internet financial companies have been unable to find a way to make it profitable. I agree with the folks at ARS Technica – true micropayments aren’t here yet.
Even the W3C closed their working group on Ecommerce/Micropayments, last updating the page back in 2001. Pretty sad. With all of the inventiveness that has been exhibited over the past 10 years of Internet growth, you would think that someone or some company would have found a way and led us all to a new era of commerce.