The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Startup Has the Key

Re:The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Sta... by rayiner on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @03:21PM (#8076394)

Econ 101: favorable transactions that would otherwise happen don't in the face of transaction costs. This fact of life plagues the web, because there are a lot of potential transactions that are, individually, only worth a few cents to the user. Advertising is the backbone of the web, I think not because users like it so much, but because it's a way to monetize clicks a few cents at a time. There is, for the time being, no practical alternative for these sorts of micro-transactions.

I think the holy grail of reducing transaction costs and friction for online payments is allowing better monetization strategies for the web. Imagine going to a website and having it auto-bill an account for a few cents per page view, instead of being greeted with a pop-over ad that's impossible to dismiss on a mobile device without accidentally clicking through. This is the big value of Stripe and its ilk. Not just reducing the cost of accepting payments (which has the economic effect of just shifting revenue away from payment processors to merchants), but enabling valuable transactions that wouldn't have happened before.

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Re:The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Sta... by harryh on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @04:18PM (#8076719)

This idea is certainly compelling from some perspectives but isn't there a lot of evidence that most people hate being nickel and dimed (which is literally what this proposal is) and in basically every instance have preferred purchasing goods in bundles?

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Re:The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Sta... by rayiner on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @04:28PM (#8076773)

The psychological aspect is definitely a hurdle, and can be viewed as a transaction cost in itself. I wonder if there's any practical ways to reduce it.

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Re:The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Sta... by harryh on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @04:29PM (#8076781)

There might be, but I'm not optimistic.

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