Micropayments

Micropayments provide an extensible way to embed in a Web page all the information necessary to initialize a micropayment (amounts and currencies, payment systems, etc). This embedding allows different micropayment electronic wallets to coexist in a interoperable manner. Micropayments have to be suitable for the sale of non-tangible goods over the Internet. This imposes requirements on speed and cost of processing of the payments: delivery occurs nearly instantaneously on the Internet, and often in arbitrarily small pieces. On the other hand, the bottleneck in sales of tangible goods, handling and shipping, sets a lower bound particularly for costs to remain economical. With the rising importance of intangible (e.g. information) goods in global economies and their instantaneous delivery at negligible cost, "conventional" payment methods tend to be more expensive than the actual product. On the other hand, billing for small portions of a product or service reduces the need of security. Micropayments are capable of handling arbitrarily small amounts of money, while keeping the cost for the individual transaction low. Likely candidates of the data elements provided are amounts and currencies, payment systems and/or brand and possibly other kinds of information like conditions of the transfer and others. This embedding should be considered in a way to facilitate an intuitive user interface and limited error handling (e.g. in case the original request was not accompanied with a payment). The latter may include practices for embedding payment requests in HTTP error codes.