'Micro payments' seem to be a good alternative to generating revenue for various types of sites. For example, a gaming company charges pennies for their users to buy clothing items to decorate their virtual creatures. They have their users pre-pay for these purchases in advance (a $25 pre-payment). Then when a user wants to buy a hat for their character, their account can be debited that amount (maybe $.10). This reduces the costs of processing the micro payments and opens up many new possibilities for revenue generation.
I am trying to figure out which Drupal modules to use to do this. I have found some old threads of people trying to implement something similar but it doesn't seem that they were successful. I am trying to implement this on a video site.
Any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated?
Thanks, Rani
Comments
I'm pretty sure both
I'm pretty sure both e-Commerce and Ubercart have Userpoints integrations. I can only speak for the UC one and say that it allows you to associate Userpoints with a product, so if someone buys a "Game Credit" product for $25, you can grant them 2500 points upon checkout. Then in future purchases you could let them pay by userpoints. I even wrote a module that would discount a product based on a user's points and then let them pay the balance by CC.
A word about micropayments... there are actually services (I know PayPal has one) that give you better rates for micropayment transactions... i.e. it would be cheaper for you to process a payment under $12 than it would one over $12. So, if you use a service like that and sell game credit in chunks of $5 or $10, you might benefit from both the micropayment fad and the cheaper processing rates.
Thank you for the details.
Thank you for the details. I am trying to test this now...