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I think this is where the advantages of payment services like PayPal come in. I've passed up buying things now and then (including ebooks) because I wasn't that interested -- not enough to fill out a form, go dig my credit card out of my wallet, and spend five or ten minutes navigating their checkout system. If I had seen a "pay with PayPal" button I'd probably have bought it. I'm no fan of PayPal -- I've been through hell with them a couple of times -- but right now, they're the biggest enabler of impulse buys on the Web.
People are slackers. That's one of the fundamental rules of business: your customer is a slacker. Your customer is a slacker, and will pay you for things that enable him to slack.
Look at our ebooks: what are the reasons we like them? We don't have to go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore and bring them home. We don't have to carry backpacks (or pull little red wagons) to take our books wherever we go. We don't have to maintain physical libraries, with all the shelving, organization, even dusting, they require. We don't have to scour used bookstores for rare and out-of-print books (I still don't have the whole original Tom Swift series on my shelves, but I have them on my 505). We don't have to put in more hours at work (or give up other things) to get books, at least those of us who share my taste for the contents of Project Gutenberg. Yeah, the cold truth is that we love our ebooks and our devices because they facilitate slacking.
So the way to make money is to 1) sell a product which appeals to the buyer's desire to slack, and b) sell it in a way that provides a least-effort path to give you money. If you're going to make people jump through hoops to pay you a penny, they'll be reluctant to pay you at all. Make it easy for us slackers!
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