The reduced overhead increases economic efficiency. There are other reasons for not doing on-line transactions. Including credit checks, interest calculations on outstanding balances, vendor reserve requirements, transaction threading, on-line wait states and bandwidth, etc. Whatever are you talking about? Credit checks for an online system? If anything, credit status for offline systems would be the salient issue. Interest calculations, if that's the product model, are consistent with both online and offline systems. Ditto for reserve requirements. Transaction serialization (threading) will be required for both systems and look to be more complicated for offline systems than for online. There are some additional costs with implementing the high-uptime systems required for online systems. On the other hand, with the right product structure, there's no need for identity at all in an online system as there is in offline systems with the ability to identify multiple spenders. Eric