Tag Archives: web

Paypal Payment vs. Micropayment comparison

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If you sell stuff online and receive payments using Paypal you probably already know that you have two options for the payment fee with Paypal. One is the standard 2.9% commission + ¢30 transaction fee. The other is so called Micropayment Discount or 5% + ¢5 per transaction. The latter, as Paypal says, is better if your typical sales are less than $10. But how much better and what is typical? – are the questions that neither Paypal nor anybody else can answer for you. Here is a simple graph showing the total percentage you’d pay to Paypal from your merchant profit depending on the transaction amount. The graph is to help you understand your odds.

Graph: two descending exponents starting at 10% and 30% intersecting at $12 continuing toward 5% and 3%

Below is my humble “analysis”. For ridiculously small amounts, like less than a dollar, collecting any money might be not a very good idea at the first place. You’d gain more if you gave it for free. So lets start with $1, a simple smartphone app for example. If you didn’t apply for Micropayment Discount you’d give 33% (every third dollar) of your profit to Paypal, or just 10% (every tenth dollar) if you did. And the difference is pretty much significant for anything significantly less than $10.

If your merchandise costs mostly around $10, especially if it’s assorted and the price is spread up to $15 or more then you might don’t want even to bother to apply for Micropayment Discount. It’s not going to save you much. Moreover, if you’re closer to $20 side you’re going to lose with Micropayment Discount. Stay standard.

For larger payments, $30 and more, the graphs flatten around 3% and 5% respectively. This means that if your Paypal account configured with Micropayment Discount you’re going to pay 2% more for Paypal’s processing services than you’d do with their standard fee plan. Not a big deal for occasional moderate spikes while majority of your sells are under $10. But definitely no-go for really big payments and/or when most of your transactions are above $10.

Google+ circles

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OK, as far as I could find so far the major, if not the only, advance Google+ have against Facebook is their circles concept. But I’m still a little confused what would be the right way to use them. The circles are great, I agree, they prop your networking up into multidimensional space. However in my opinion it’s still a half-way solution. And here is why I think so.

1. The circles are sharing circles, not the reading ones. Or not? I create circles and put certain people in them to control whose streams I’m going to clatter with my posts. I’m sure that some geeks are absolutely not interested in my kid’s photos, and my relatives are least likely would appreciate my nerdy essays in their stream as well. OK, that’s how I understood the circles at the first glance. And it seems to work this way, I mean one-way. But why all my the same circles are used as filters for my own reading stream. Does it mean that I have to carefully redesign my circles to make use of them for my reading? Should I create a circle “most interesting” and add and remove people to it based on their posts’ interestingness? Then there will be two kinds of circles, outgoing and incoming. Will they be there? Double the number of dimensions?

2. Circles tend to produce more circles. Wherever there are overlapping circles there will be unions, intersections, differences, products etc. It’s the basics of the Set Theory. Examples? Well, union is the simplest, and it’s already implemented in Google+. Just check as many circles as you want when you’re sharing something – that will be a union. Intersection? Let’s say I have “Geeks” and “Can read Russian” circles. When I post something geeky in Russian, guess who would I like to address the post? I believe the intersection of “Geeks” and “Can read Russian” should be my target. Next the difference. Let’s say in addition to the previous two I also have “Coworkers” circle. Again, all of these three circles can overlap easily. What if I want to subtract “Coworkers” (including my geeky boss) from “Geeks” circle if I’m going to ask an advice on, let’s say, job hunting from all my geeky friends? So there should be a subtraction functionality in G+ circles too. I hope Google will think about all this math.

So there is plenty of work to do to implement the circles properly. The only hope is that Google has enough resources to do it right. Maybe it’s not time yet, and that’s why the enrollment to G+ is limited for now. For the meantime Google+ is just raw. Well, no problem, we can wait.

Amazon Web Services

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I know that to have your own personal blog is cool, but to have it on your own web host is double cool. That’s true. However what can be even cooler to have your web host running in your own Linux virtual box? No, not running it in a real box in your garage. It was cool, even geeky, but some years ago. These days everything more or less advanced goes into… clouds. Yes, cloud computing they call it. Is it a right thing? – Yes, I want an answer on this question too. And there is only one way to find out – to try it on.

So that is it. This particular web-site, being my beloved guinea pig, has moved onto Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to test the Amazon Web Services in field conditions. Luckily Amazon gives their new customers Free Usage Tier, a package of free usage enough to run a “micro” instance of a Linux round a clock for a year. The “micro” instance means 613MB of RAM. One must acknowledge that this “Free Usage Tier” doesn’t mean free service – Amazon is going to charge for every tiny inhale and separately for an exhale in the cloud. The only hope is they cost pennies each. What amount those pennies are going to pile up in in a month, that’s what I’m going to find out and compare to my current Virtual Private Server, which is $20 a month flat for 512MB RAM virtual machine. I specifically do not mention other resources like disk space and CPU GHz since they are not as significant as RAM is and don’t actually define the price. We will see.

How is Amazon? – So far not bad. A bit complicated to get started, but one can call it being geeky and be cool oneself. Good thing everything is well documented and explained at the AWS web-site. Also it seems like the community of fellow customers is scarily large. How is performance? – My ssh terminal logged in this box feels much more responsive then with my old VPS. I think it’s just the disk I/O at my old service provider needs improvement. Everything else works fairly well on both sites, so can’t compare yet. I didn’t do any benchmarks and am not going to. Next step will be to put some load (move more web-sites) onto the machine and see how it feels in the web-browser. I’ll keep you updated.