Remember Beanz?
Nope, of course you don’t… it was many years ago… practically stone-age by the Internet timescale. 
Beanz was a digital currency… a way for people to buy and sell things online without reverting to credit cards.
Beanz died… along with most other digital currencies. (the Beanz.com website now promotes coffee. lol. But you can still see their splashscreen from May 2000)
Why?
Because they didn’t achieve critical mass. Not enough people used the competing digital currencies to make them viable.
So how do you accept money?
Well, at the moment, you either take credit card payments via a third party or your own merchant account. PayPal is probably the most famous third party credit card processor who also lets you send money direct from one PayPal account to another. Clickbank is another famous third party processor.
Now other big players are muscling in on PayPal’s credit-card processing territory. It’s good news for merchants as they have more companies vying for their credit card processing business.
Recently Google launched Google Checkout with free sales processing through Google Checkout until the end of 2007… and they incentivized their Adwords advertisers to use the system by offsetting ten times the money advertisers spend on Adwords against their Google Checkout sales. Spend a dollar on Adwords? You can process $10 in sales via Google Checkout the next month for free. Very smart.
Now Amazon has a “Amazon Flexible Payments Service” in beta and says it’s “the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure”.
Sounds like a potential contender.
Who’s next into this arena? Yahoo’s PayDirect died off and Microsoft’s Passport didn’t seem to catch many people’s imagination. Perhaps they’re still working on some secret plans.
I not only remember Beenz – I worked for their advertsing agency and was in charge of the planning of hteir media budgets.
Or would have been if they had thought it necessary to spend some of the millions of dollars of investors money that they burned their way through on a bit of old-fashioned advertising.
Actually, the entire concept was fatally flawed – I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but the main problem was a complete misunderstanding by the client of the dynamics of the target audience they wanted to make Beenz appeal to.
Those were the days!
Martin