The solutions Because micropayments are fairly new, several systems are in the works. With token-based schemes the broker acts as a mint, accepting payment for the service of creating and tracking scrip, a form of cash that can be used only by customers at vendor sites that have signed on to accept the broker's scrip as payment for goods and services. Scrip is usually measured in regular currency, but the customer is protected from having to share credit card information with individual vendors. Some services, such as Flooz, choose to support their own alternative currencies. Micropayment brokers of the billing type attach bills to phone company or ISP accounts and operate on a principle similar to 1-900 numbers.
Users pay in regular currencies, with the amounts appended to their regular bills.
In-house or proprietary solutions are mainly limited to larger companies that are able to absorb the associated administrative expenses. Because many micropayment companies are untested in the long term, you may want to avoid hitching your wagon to a start-up, only to see it crash and burn within a year. However, going it alone requires a hefty amount of internal IT expertise and may actually exclude customers who participate in a more universal system. Each of the systems we looked at feature a mix of token-based and billing features, some operating as hosted services and others as server software that you license and maintain yourself. Regardless of the system you choose, it will be necessary to partition for-pay sections of your site and equally important to designate those sections with simple, unobtrusive identifiers and prices.