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WT09 MALTA “One click: buy, two clicks: bye bye”: billing at a crossroads |
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30/04/2009 10:29:25 |
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“People want content and you have to make it easy for them to buy it or you have lost the business. It’s simple: one click: buy, two clicks: bye bye.” So Alex Robson from TeleBilling told delegates and WORLD TELEMEDIA MALTA this week in a panel debate on billing chaired by Paul Craig from Enarpee.
The session brought to the fore the fact that a lot of the billing mechanisms available to the industry at present are lacking in ease of use, trust, familiarity and, of course, decent revenue share: and something has to be done about this pretty soon if the industry is to move forward.
The rise of PC-like mobile web devices was already making WAP billing look clumsy and many in the telemedia industry suggest that mobile operators are not making systems such as Payforit easy for consumers to discover and use, and as a result they are loosing business.
But, Anil Malhotra from Bango pointed out that with such a fragmented market of device types and needs of consumers, the wealth of billing services available was just what is needed.
“There is no de facto digital billing mechanism, but we need different billing mechanisms for different devices, behaviour, products and geographies,” he told delegates. “It is a complex market, so we are not expecting a single, simple solution any time soon.”
But even dedicated fans of Payforit, such a Dialogue Communications, which was also on the panel, agreed that whatever billing mechanisms were used they had to be simple to use and trusted.
And evidence suggests that among iPhone users, the preferred method of payment for anything on the phone was credit card and that, among the small group of users (relative to the vast majority of the mobile market who don’t have iPhones) they had no issue with entering credit card details over the air.
This, like many things to do with the iPhone, was already starting to shift perception as to the use of electronic wallets, credit and even debit cards as a much more preferable billing mechanism than WAP billing services.
Credit cards and electronic wallets such as PayPal have not grab mass market on mobile because, so the conventional wisdom has it, users don’t trust putting in their details to the device.
This, however, is increasingly being debunked with a range of companies, such as panellist TeleBilling, as well as Txtrans and TextNation looking at new ways to offer credit card based billing over mobile (see last edition of Telemedia magazine, pages 30 to 36). The main advantage, of course, is pay outs are much better than those offered by MNOS.
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