Mobile/SMS billing – EXPLAINED!
I’ve been answering a lot of enquiries and questions about SMS payments, and thought it would be useful to post a few here with some explanations…
>>Which countries/mobiles do you accept?
We accept payments from mobiles on any GSM, or equivalent network that supports Premium SMS, anywhere in the world. At the last count, this was over 500 networks in more than 200 countries.
>>How does it work?
We’ve deisgned and built a payment engine. Customer lands on your payment area (CCBill/whatever everybody's using these days), and pops on our payment page. We give him instructions of how to SMS us for payment, we clear the payment here, then send him a unique PIN that he has to enter to proceed. On a good day, takes about 30 seconds, but can get slowed down by high volume calls on the network (friday night!).
>>Is this for content on mobile phones?
Not necessarily. The most obvious thing to charge a customer, is for access to a paysite. Now if you're not running pay, but have good traffic on TGPs and linklists, then the most obvious thing would be to sell something direct from those pages - either download to mobile, or a little paid area.
>>I make my money from directing traffic to sponsors, what has this got to with me?
OK, so you've got growing traffic coming through your TGPs? First thing - I wouldn't do anything to that traffic that's going to send them away, or give them any other place to disappear. I mean, don't send them to a wapsite. It's crazy. You're just going to lose them. I think if you've got traffic, you've got eyeballs, give them an opportunity to buy right there - instant, with their mobile
Now, what they're going to buy is what you need to figure out. My feeling is that guy is looking for porn, not a ringtone (not to dis the mobile content guys - but this guy is there for a reason, not inspiration). So it's either going to be some mobile content that fits with your TGPs (whatever niche), or a little 'privileged-access area' that he can go into (online) once he's paid with his mobile.
>>Should I build a mobile portal?
I think the mobile portal is a nice add-on when you have some time, but you've got opportunity to bank right now! I think you should get some good content to put into an online 'privileged-access/VIP' area that costs something like $2 for a days access. Refresh every day/week.
>>I doubt there's enough traffic on my TGPs to get customers just yet unfortunately.
you'd be surprised, I think there's a big novelty value in offering your traffic something totally fresh like using their mobile.
>>I'd also like to see how difficult it is to add SMS billing.
Just so you know. No setup costs, no monthlies, no chargebacks-we just take a few %. All you add to a website is a payment link - whole thing, from signup to trading takes a few minutes.
>>What about fraud?
Fraud definitely occurs with mobile - we've worked with people who regularly lose up to $20,000 a month from fraud! We designed our platform to verify and confirm billing completion all along the chain, so fraud is at an all time low. There are no chargebacks!
>>I’m not sure this is a viable billing just yet
This is a viable and actual billing solution NOW. No matter where you’re traffic is coming from, our payment system works like dialers - the customer just pays from where he's located, we accrue all payments centrally and settle with you. Billions of SMS are sent every month, so it’s the right time to start adding payment possibility on your sites. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to add the system (all you do is add a payment link, and we'll integrate to your server).
As always, I'm on ICQ 256033740
Best wishes to all
Newdom
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