BitPass Rolls out a Hosted Service for Small Sellers of Digital Content

Bitpass Inc., a 2-year-old processor of micropayments on the Internet, has rolled out a new service allowing individuals and small businesses to sell music, photos, or other digital content without creating an e-commerce site. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bitpass says it will host the content for sellers and handle payments, “from 25-cent downloads to $100 purchases.” Sellers may sell their content by inserting a link for each item in e-mail or instant messages. The company, which is introducing the new product, called BitPass Studios, on the first anniversary of the commercial rollout of its micropayments service, says sellers pay no setup or software charges or recurring fees. BitPass charges a transaction fee of 30% for items priced at $5 or under; 10% plus a dollar for items costing more than $5. These merchant fees for Studios users are double BitPass's standard fees, which are 15% at or under $5 and 5% plus 50 cents above $5. “Pricing for BitPass Studios is higher since we're providing the additional service of hosting the content,” says a BitPass spokesperson. For sellers that have already created a site but don't have the resources to configure a Web server for e-commerce, BitPass will provide a line of HTML code the sellers can incorporate in their sites to create a point of sale for each item they're selling. To promote the new service, BitPass is offering sellers 100MB of free storage space if they sign up for Studios by Jan. 31. Since its commercial debut last December, BitPass has enrolled more than 1,900 sellers of digital content. The company refuses to say how many buyers are using the service. BitPass allows buyers to make purchases online for as little as pennies at a time by debiting prepaid accounts. Buyers fund the accounts with credit cards or PayPal. The company has the backing of a number of venture-capital companies, as well as processing giant First Data Corp.