An investigation on using web services for micro-payment

Abstract

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. As Business to Business (B2B) has been a main stream of the e-commerce activities for a decade, business to customer (B2C) is still a new area to explore. Among the business to customer activities, a strong impact is security, i.e., how to protect secrets of various parties in business transactions. Different security methods apply to different businesses and meet different customers needs. The methods with low cost and easy to implement may be less secure, whereas the methods providing high level security can be unaffordable to many small enterprises and individuals. In particular, people, while browsing or surfing on the Web, wish to pay a very small amount and buy (perhaps just download) an interesting item from the Web. The click-and-pay or click-and-buy does not require high security protection and should be convenient to use (buy and pay). Micro-payment issue emerges from the context to meet the need of applicability of low secure and cost in e-purchase. Payments of small amounts may enable many exciting applications on the Internet, such as selling information, small software and services. Users are willing to pay a small amount of money for the information, software and services. While the payment is small, expensive security protection is unnecessary. What users require may include negligible delay, rapid click-through, and automatic billing. Micro-payment is a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. In this paper, we intend to investigate and analyze various aspects of micro-payment system using the web service technology. We will discuss business patterns for micro-payment systems using Web Services approaches.