Small Dollar Virtual Currency Service Needed
shoemoney
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3 min read
About once a week it seems me and David have a talk about micro payments on the web and a way to do them properly. Both of us agree it is a service badly needed but we also agree we do not want to do it =P. Right now if you want to send someone a small amount of money there just is no way to do it that makes much sense.
I am a huge fan of virtual "credits" or "points". Basically people can cash in $10 or whatever the equiv currency would be and receive 1000 credits.. for fun lets just call them shoemoney dollars. Now people on their blogs or whatever could easily send money or "tip" other people for posts/content/whatever they like.
So I hear you... some of you out there are like well you can do that now with things like scratchback right? Sure you can but its REALLY inefficient. Let me show you why.
Just for instance I am going to use Shawn Collins blog affililate tip. As you can see I can send him $1 paypal to get a link on his blog via Scratchback:
Looking at the Paypal calculator Paypal is going to take 33% of the payment. So after Paypal takes there 1/3 of $1 and scratchback takes their 30% (I think that is their percentage but I could not find it on the site) That leaves like 40% some percent actually goes to Shawn Collins. Hrmmm
UPDATE: Jim from scratchback has emailed me and said scratchback only takes 10% not 30% as I guessed. I had 30% in my head not sure why.
BUT lets say Scratchback allowed me to buy ehhh... lets call it SCRATCHBUCKS where it was even a even swap $10 = 10 scratch bucks... And I could distribute those scratchbucks at my leisure to people who have scratchback accounts.
So for $10 now Paypal only takes out .59 cents or what amounts to 5.9%... Its still pretty high like 1/6th of what was being taken out before...
And the more you convert into "scratchbucks" the less paypal would actually take (and you could be compensated with more scratchbucks or something for depositing more at the time.
So under the current system if you were to "tip" 50 $1 bloggers Paypal would take over $16. But if you allowed deposits and made your own virtual currency like scratchbucks then Paypal would have only taken $1.75 =) Scratchbucks 4tw.
Ok I got a little wild with Scratchback as a example but the whole point is that I feel right now there is a huge need for a service that will handle micro payments. Even using paypal is probably a bad idea being that you could get a merchant account and get probably 1/2 to 2/3rds lower percentage then what Paypal takes. (which someone would obviously do with something like this).
The coolest thing is that you have basically created your own currency (IMO). You can set the rates.
I dunno maybe we will create a service for this when our current projects are done. Or maybe a reader will....
Looking at the Paypal calculator Paypal is going to take 33% of the payment. So after Paypal takes there 1/3 of $1 and scratchback takes their 30% (I think that is their percentage but I could not find it on the site) That leaves like 40% some percent actually goes to Shawn Collins. Hrmmm
UPDATE: Jim from scratchback has emailed me and said scratchback only takes 10% not 30% as I guessed. I had 30% in my head not sure why.
BUT lets say Scratchback allowed me to buy ehhh... lets call it SCRATCHBUCKS where it was even a even swap $10 = 10 scratch bucks... And I could distribute those scratchbucks at my leisure to people who have scratchback accounts.
So for $10 now Paypal only takes out .59 cents or what amounts to 5.9%... Its still pretty high like 1/6th of what was being taken out before...
And the more you convert into "scratchbucks" the less paypal would actually take (and you could be compensated with more scratchbucks or something for depositing more at the time.
So under the current system if you were to "tip" 50 $1 bloggers Paypal would take over $16. But if you allowed deposits and made your own virtual currency like scratchbucks then Paypal would have only taken $1.75 =) Scratchbucks 4tw.
Ok I got a little wild with Scratchback as a example but the whole point is that I feel right now there is a huge need for a service that will handle micro payments. Even using paypal is probably a bad idea being that you could get a merchant account and get probably 1/2 to 2/3rds lower percentage then what Paypal takes. (which someone would obviously do with something like this).
The coolest thing is that you have basically created your own currency (IMO). You can set the rates.
I dunno maybe we will create a service for this when our current projects are done. Or maybe a reader will....