CarrotPay has developed a number of tools and services for web based merchants to enable them to cost effectively charge small amounts for their digital products.

The choice of tools will be made in accordance with the level of programming skills available, and the type and quantity of products to be sold. Fundamentally, there are two categories: client-side only, and sever-side solutions. Client-side solutions are the most straight forward, needing little or no programming expertise. Sever-side solutions can vary greatly in the amount of programming required but will usually be more productive for a large number of sale items and can provide greater security with the addition of transaction tracking.

CarrotPay Technology

The core mechanism used by CarrotPay is the 'Protected Link'. Protected Links allow a merchant to openly place a link to a product on their site, without fear that someone will directly fetch the product using the link without first paying. This is achieved by placing a critical element of the link (often the filename), in square brackets (i.e. “[“ & “]”). Please see HTML Integtration Guide for full details, but briefly, a CarrotPay 'Buy button' will submit a form to CarrotPay which will include a link to a product. This link will contain some part in square brackets and CarrotPay will transform the data in the brackets with a cryptographic hash. The transformed link will now point directly to the product's filename or may be received by a server-side program which can check it to determine if the correct payment has been made. This sounds more complicated than it is in practice so just wait to see the examples.

For added security, CarrotPay also supports 'Protected Content'. Protected Content is ordinary html that has been encrypted. In order to view the html correctly, a decryption key needs to be used and this is obtained from a Protected Link. Although this technique does require advanced programming expertise to implement, CarrotPay has implemented a Javascript library which hides the details from the merchant so that no skill is required beyond pasting text into an html page from a wizard. For full details see RMP Protected Content Integration Guide.