Selling Downloads with Paypal is More Profitable with Micropayments

So your band has a paypal account to sell your CD for $12 bucks. That’s great. But what if you want to get into selling downloads for a buck? Well that means you get to keep about .70 of that dollar. (2.9% + .30)

As most people don’t deal with "little" transactions most people don’t know about Paypal’s micropayment system. Its acts the same but the fees are different.  Now the fees are much less (5%+ .05) So that download you just sold for a buck? You get to keep .90 That’s an increase of 20%.

Now you can use a micropayment paypal account just like any the "typical" paypal (and tie it into a system like Download Guard and sell downloads for more profit.

Here is how Paypal explains it on their site:

Each PayPal account is associated with only one merchant processing rate. That rate determines the fee that’s applied to funds received into that account (additional information on PayPal’s Standard Fees is available here). For example: if your Premier/Business account rate for receiving funds is 2.9% + $0.30, using PayPal’s 5% + $0.05 micropayments rate would reduce the total transaction fee charged to payments received below the value of $12 (per payment). However, if you accept payments that are greater than $12, you would pay a lower processing charge by accepting the payment into the account set with the 2.9% + $0.30 rate.