[Perdition]

>Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens.

No, you can click on a button and get a redirect to Paypal, where you then enter your Paypal password and hit "confirm".

Paypal's whole business model is based around making transactions like this convenient and easy (for the payer).

[alsetmusic]

And at some point you had to go through the vetting process with PayPal. When I signed on, I had to verify a micro transaction into my account (years ago, dunno about today) in addition to the traditional forms. And, of course, I thought about whether or not I trusted PayPal for a while before I took the plunge. There's baggage with every system at some point. Clearing the initial inconvenience is one of the biggest steps because it affords the user time to reconsider.

[Perdition]

Pretty much everyone who buys things on the Internet has a Paypal account.

You may as well say that the inconvenience of opening a bank account is too much baggage for people to use Paypal, except pretty much everyone who wants to use Paypal already has a bank account.

You are correct that trying to get users to put CC details in to pay a "microtransaction" will put people off, but there are plenty of convenient (two - three click) payment processes that already have huge amounts of users.