Legacy Payment Options Fail the Modern Consumer Experience

The Dropp micropayment platform was developed due to the fact that existing payment models are failing today’s consumers and merchants. Failing consumers by forcing them into limited payment choices that offer diluted value and failing merchants through punitive expenses coupled with total revenue uncertainty.

How did we get here? First the good. As we’ve become a more digital society, variety of and access to content and services has never been more abundant. Consumers quite literally have the world at their fingertips. For merchants and creators, the ability to create revenue streams and engage with consumers on a global scale has never been easier. Now the bad. The problem is that the methods by which consumers pay for content and services have been slow to evolve and fallen short. Traditional payment options, such as subscriptions and ad-based content access, which have been the predominant choices of monetizing digital services are limiting consumer choice and crushing the finances of small businesses. It's increasingly clear that these models are not keeping up with the preferences and spending habits of modern consumers and merchants, creating a lose-lose situation for all involved. Let’s take a deeper look.

Subscription models force consumers into rigid "one-size fits all" options and mandatory monthly payments. These models can be excessively costly for occasional users and lack flexibility, making it hard to change or cancel services as needs change. This can lead to subscription fatigue, with consumers overwhelmed by managing and paying for multiple services. In fact, 72%1 of US consumers feel there are too many subscription choices blocking their desired content or services, and the average user pays for five subscriptions monthly. Additionally, 34%2 admit that they pay for subscription services that they never use!

Ad-based content or services have their own problems. While this option makes access “free” to consumers, they end up getting bombarded with ads that can be intrusive and completely disrupt the user experience. Also, it's not uncommon for consumers to feel like their online activities are being constantly monitored and monetized, eroding their sense of privacy and trust in the service. Finally, the effectiveness of these ads is questionable at best, as consumers get frustrated by repetitive and oftentimes irrelevant ads. This frustration drives consumers away from platforms that rely on ad revenue, ultimately affecting their business.

It's become more and more clear that what consumers want is the ability to pay for what they want access to – and only what they want access to. Nearly three-quarters or 70%3 of global consumers would prefer the ability to pay for what they use, rather than subscription or ad-based barriers.

On the merchant and creator side of this, they have their own challenges with these payment models. Offering subscriptions requires significant investments in marketing and customer retention efforts to justify the cost to consumers. This causes a merciless cycle that puts pressure on merchants to maintain and grow their subscriber base, which draws resources away from what brings consumers to them in the first place – the actual content or service they’re offering. Throw in the fact that competition for subscribers is fierce, and smaller merchants often find it incredibly difficult to find success with this model.

Merchants depending on the ad-based model face a tough landscape. It's increasingly difficult to earn income as consumers either resist invasive ads or use ad-blockers. Privacy regulations further complicate matters, putting pressure on merchants to comply with requirements on data tracking and collection which is very costly, eating into their profits. Merchants find themselves stuck in a tough spot, trying to balance revenue needs with privacy demands and user experience.

Regardless of either of these options, merchants must also deal with swipe fees, the notorious charges by payment card networks for processing debit and credit card transactions. After labor, they are often the highest operating cost for merchants4! As more and more consumer transactions trend towards low dollar amounts, these fees can be crippling. For example, existing credit card fees can be 3% of the total transaction plus additional costs, meaning merchants are not realizing the revenues that they should. Online it’s no better, for example if a payment of $1 is made via Stripe, the merchant must pay as much as .52 cents – or 52% of the transaction!

When 50% of reported consumer transactions are less than $50 – this is unsustainable for small businesses. This restricts growth, investment, and competitiveness, impacting not only individual merchants but also the broader economy.

There is a better way.

Dropp - Unleashing the Pay-per-use Digital Economy

Motivated by the state of the digital economy and its future potential, the team at Dropp committed themselves to evolving the existing payment market. How have they done this? By developing a modern platform that supports the smallest of transactions that is fast, secure, affordable, and easy to use for both consumers and merchants. The Dropp platform eliminates the restrictions of the antiquated subscription and ad-based revenue models giving consumers more freedom and control over their spending; while providing merchants the ability to innovate their business models and more easily monetize their offerings.

By facilitating micropayments, Dropp allows for transactions to be in increments that were previously deemed too small to be feasible, or expensive to support, making them more accessible and cost-effective for everyone involved.

The Consumer story

For consumers, Dropp provides far greater freedom of control over purchasing options versus the traditional subscription or ad-based models. Dropp's pay as you go model gives users complete control over their spending. Users can choose to pay for exactly what they want, when they want it, without having to commit to a subscription or be bombarded with ads. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for consumers, such as being able to pay for individual articles on news websites, watch individual episodes of TV shows on streaming services, or even use a bikeshare service for just a few minutes without having to commit to a long term subscription. They can even tip their favorite content creators.

Dropp delivers an incredibly frictionless user experience so that using the platform is simple and straightforward. Users can create an account through the Dropp mobile app or website, choose a payment method whether pay by bank , credit card, or digital currency like HBAR or USDCl, then start using the service to pay out of their digital wallet for content and services from any merchant in the Dropp network. This could include the millions of online retailers using Shopify or Wordpress based storefronts. Consumers also have the flexibility to transact in fiat currency, stablecoins, and cryptocurrency. This gives users the flexibility to choose the payment method that is most convenient for them.

Dropp takes consumer protection very seriously and enforces users' privacy by not sharing their personal information with merchants. That way they don’t have to worry about their information being sold to or shared with third party services - as many ad-based platforms are guilty of doing. Dropp even also offers a variety of features to make it easy to manage micropayments, such as budgets, spending limits, and real-time insights into spending habits, giving consumers greater financial independence.

Why Dropp makes sense for businesses

For merchants, the Dropp micropayment platform can literally transform how they do business. Dropp eliminates the punitive fees structures that are eating away at their profitability while allowing them to enable more customer transactions by offering their products and services on a pay-per-use basis. This opens up new revenue opportunities that are in tune with consumer preferences.

With Dropp, the fees for merchants are minimal. The structure begins at .05 cents on each dollar up to $5, then 1% for each dollar above $5, which is in stark contrast to existing payment methods. This fee structure is 10x cheaper than existing credit card and PayPal fees and 60% cheaper for a $10 transaction. When dealing with small value purchases at scale, the cost savings of the Dropp platform are incredibly significant. These savings allow merchants to realize more revenue and growth than they ever would under the existing system. It’s possible for Dropp to offer these lower rates due to the architecture of the platform. Dropp is built on the Hedera distributed ledger which supports the high transaction volumes a payment platform requires, but with incredibly low fees.

Dropp’s opens up a myriad of revenue opportunities with their pay-per-use micropayment service. For example, a merchant or content creator could use Dropp to sell individual articles, photos, streaming content, or even limited access to a physical service, rather than charging an oversized fee. This allows them to make money without having to rely on advertising or subscriptions. Another example would be a software developer using Dropp to sell individual API calls or to enable users to subscribe to their application on a short-term basis, which allows them to offer a variety of more appealing pricing options to their users while still generating some recurring revenue.

Offering micropayments can also help to increase customer conversion rates by making it easier and more affordable to buy products and services. A customer is much more likely to buy a $1 song than a $10 album, pay .50 cents to read a single article from a news site, or rent a single tv episode from a streaming service over subscribing to their entire catalog. The flexibility offered to customers may lower the individual pricing - but the volume of these smaller purchases more than makes up for it. This also reduces customer churn by simply making it easier for customers to pay for the products and services that they use.

Dropp also helps merchants and creators expand their customer base through a number of different methods. First, merchants can offer new and returning customers special offers or discounts on purchases which helps to incentivize repeat buying. And for creators, they can offer exclusive access to new content or unique experiences to their patrons and fans. Second, the fact that Dropp supports a variety of payment methods, including fiat and cryptocurrencies allows merchants and creators to be flexible in how payments are received, which appeals to a wider range of customers.

Enabling Micropayments with Hedera

So why did Dropp build in Hedera? The Hedera distributed ledger was designed from the ground up to be fast, fair, and secure - qualities that make it an excellent choice for building a micropayment platform.

As previously mentioned, the Hedera distributed ledger is capable of supporting the high transaction volumes a micropayment platform requires, achieving speeds of up to 10,000 transactions per second with very low latency. This speed is critical for micropayments where potentially millions of small transactions need to be processed quickly.

Another key advantage of Hedera is its low transaction fees. In contrast to many other networks, Hedera's fees are fractions of a cent per transaction, making it very economically viable for micropayments. These cost benefits are passed along to the merchants that are handling these transactions, enabling the low fee structures of the Dropp platform.

The Hedera network can also be easily adapted to support a variety of use cases for Dropp, whether it's paying for individual articles, renting an e-bike, using a charging station, or purchasing single tracks from an album, the platform can be easily be configured to support these scenarios by leveraging the Hedera smart contract service, where smart contracts can be programmed to meet the needs of the use case.

Hedera also offers the strongest form of security in distributed computing in that it’s asynchronously Byzantine Fault Tolerant. It makes the Hedera network resilient against any attacks, ensuring that micropayments are processed safely and reliably.

In addition to these security features, Hedera’s governance structure, led by a council of 26 global enterprises, is an advantage for the Dropp platform, which has to comply with the rigorous requirements of financial institutions and regulatory bodies.

What does the future hold for Dropp?

The future is now for Dropp. Dropp is set to play a major role in the future of instant payments with it’s recent listing in the Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service Provider Showcase. FedNow is a new instant payment service that the US Federal Reserve is making available for banks and credit unions to transfer funds for their customers. It will allow consumers and businesses to send and receive payments in near real-time, eliminating the usual multi-day delay in transaction settlement as well as the typical expenses associated with these transactions such as wire fees. With this, Dropp will be able to support instant payments, regardless of amount, to a wider variety of merchants and consumers.

Additionally, thanks to their involvement with both The Clearing House’s RTP protocal and the FedNow program, the team at Dropp are working with banking institutions to integrate Dropp with their services. So when you open a bank account, you will get an option to open up an account with Dropp, enabling secure payments directly from an individual’s bank account.

Finally, as they continue with their plans to expand globally, the Dropp platform will soon be able to empower the billions of unbanked, underbanked, and prepaid users around the world with instant purchasing power, unlocking massive economic potential.

Dropp is the future of the digital economy, and we’re excited that it’s finally happening.