Web Directions

Make the world a better place, one micropayment at the time

• In: Uncategorized
• By:Maxine
• October 22, 2007
• Leave a response

Got wind of a really cool Aussie project today: The Footprints Network.

This is a great lit­tle sys­tem to eas­ily fun­nel micro­pay­ments from any online store’s cus­tomers to gen­uinely needy organ­i­sa­tions the world over.

There’s an approval process to join the net­work, but then you get an API that you can inte­grate with your pay­ment sys­tem to allow cus­tomers to add on a microdona­tion when they pur­chase some­thing from your online store. So you can sim­ply have a check­box for exam­ple that says “Add $1 for orphan care in Zimbabwe”.

Definitely plan to imple­ment this for Web Directions next time around, but you know what I’m think­ing? People like us could have a pow­er­ful net­work effect in spread­ing this amongst the organ­i­sa­tions we do work for, and encour­ag­ing them to use it in their ecom­merce projects. OK, I don’t know how tricky it is to actu­ally work with their API, but I’m think­ing devel­op­ers could get into the habit of at least run­ning this by their clients in any new projects, and of course includ­ing any extra devel­op­ment work it involved gratis.

Just a thought: would love to hear from any­one who has already joined up.

3 responses to “Make the world a better place, one micropayment at the time”:

1. • By:Lisa
   • October 22nd, 2007
   

   You know there’s no rea­son why it couldn’t be added into a blog I guess… for exam­ple, read­ers could make a small dona­tion is they really liked a post. or even if they sim­ply felt like it…

   I think this is a great idea.

2. • By:maxine
   • October 23rd, 2007
   

   Yeah, although I think that would require a slightly dif­fer­ent setup to how Footprints Network works. But yes, it would be inter­est­ing to see if peo­ple would respond to this.

3. • By:simon monk
   • October 25th, 2007
   

   Thanks. The thing to remem­ber about our API is that you can’t just make a dona­tion on its own. The rea­son this works is that the dona­tion pig­gy­backs on the back of another com­mer­cial trans­ac­tion and thus we can pass 100% on to the projects since we have zero trans­ac­tion costs.

   We are actively seek­ing part­ners at the moment and are talk­ing with some major travel brands and a few banks but if any­one has any con­tacts within say Apple or Amazon or any other large trans­ac­tion vol­ume web site we would most like to hear from you.

Your opinion: