Patent ID: 7177838

Claim:
A method of conducting electronic commerce over the Internet using micropayments, the method comprising: opening a user account with a vendor for a user; issuing one or more electronic tokens from the vendor to the user account, wherein no physical manifestation, other than a database entry, of the user account occurs, each electronic token having a value of at least a fraction of a dollar; providing products and services that may be purchased from the vendor at micropayment levels, wherein prices for the products and services are listed in units of electronic tokens; permitting the user to select, at any participating vendor web site, a subset of the products and services for purchase from the vendor; computing at the participating vendor web site a total price for the selected subset of the products and services in units of electronic tokens; authorizing a purchase transaction at the participating vendor web site without requiring any third party authentication and a physical manifestation of the user account; and if the user account contains electronic tokens having a value equal to or greater than the total price, permitting the user to purchase the selected subset of the products and services without requiring the user to disclose personal information to the vendor, and subtracting the total price from the user account, wherein the purchase transaction is not subject to a minimum processing fee.