The Electronic Commerce Activity is currently involved in realizing the opportunities in micropayments, and this forms the main thrust of the Activity. Micropayments are very small payments made over the Web for pages that you access. Micropayments cover transactions which are too small to be economical as credit card transactions, and can be as little as a fraction of a cent. Micropayments provide an alternative to subscription and advertising as a source of revenue. Payments could in who owns a domain name kentucky web design principle go in either direction - some sites could conceivably pay you to visit them. Concepts Simply Explained The user's perspective How do micropayments work from the user's point of view? At this stage it is impossible to be specific, but we can at least give some idea. You can imagine something like the following: If you click on a link requiring a payment, the browser would look for an "electronic wallet", a piece of software that acts kentucky web design kentucky web design a bit like a rechargeable phone card, except that it would work for Web pages rather than phone calls. The wallet would make payment for information downloaded, keeping track of how much was left, how much had been "spent", and so on. But how would you know what a given piece of information cost? Links you have to pay for might be marked in a different color, and in principle, the browser could show the cost as you ecommerce services kentucky web design moved over the link. Only when you actually clicked on the link would the payment be made, and only then would the information you requested be made available via your browser. The wallet might come pre-installed as part of the browser. If not, you would be invited to download a new wallet. Before the wallet could be used it would need to be initialized in some way, figuratively filling it with cash or credit. Different micropayment systems will cheap domain name registration kentucky web design have different