While micropayments were originally envisioned to involve very small sums of money, practical systems to allow transactions of less than US$1 have seen little success.
[5][verification needed] The term was coined by Ted Nelson,[6] long before the invention of the World Wide Web.
[10] During the late 1990s, there was a movement to create microtransaction standards,[3] and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) worked on incorporating micropayments into HTML, even going as far as to suggest the embedding of payment-request information in HTTP error codes.
[2] The W3C has since stopped its efforts in this area,[2] and micropayments have not become a widely used method of selling content over the Internet.
IBM's Micro Payments was established c. 1999,[11] and were it to have become operational would have "allowed vendors and merchants to sell content, information, and services over the Internet for amounts as low as one cent".
[15] It grew out of The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce, which was presented at the 1995 World Wide Web Conference in Boston,[16] but the project became associated with Compaq after that company purchased Digital Equipment Corporation.
[17] The NetBill electronic commerce project at Carnegie Mellon university researched Distributed transaction processing systems and developed protocols and software to support payment for goods and services over the Internet.
Current systems either allow many micropayments but charge the user's phone bill one lump sum or use funded wallets.
Dropp is a micropayments platform that allows consumers and merchants to make and accept payments as low as $0.01 for physical or digital goods and services.
Dropp provides an alternative monetization model to digital merchants while maintaining complete privacy for consumer transactions.
Dropp is currently supported on mobile and web browsers and has Shopify and WordPress user plugins for accepting micropayments.
Similar apps with zero fee for small instant private transactions, Vipps and MobilePay have become popular in Norway and Denmark.
Tikkie is a Dutch payment system in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, run by the ABN AMRO bank.