Micropayment

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What Does Micropayment Mean?

A micropayment is an e-commerce transaction-type with a low financial amount. Micropayments are typically used to purchase online products and services such as e-books, music and memberships.

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Techopedia Explains Micropayment

By definition, most micropayment transactions are small with sales averaging $20 or less.

Most payment providers provide APIs at a seller’s website that redirect buyers to the provider’s website, where the buyer submits financial details for processing. These details, with the exception of the transaction fee, are then routed to the seller’s account.

The key benefit to this process is the payment provider’s ability to serve as a single secure payment contact for sellers and buyers. Sellers can provide multiple websites and/or products without the overhead of a merchant account, and buyers can pay many different sellers under one secure transaction umbrella. Easy and secure adaptability is at the core of e-commerce growth at the micro level.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.