how significant is sms billing
 

Just wanted some feedback on sms billing. regards to what % of sales increase do you see if you have it as a payment option. Is it in the 5-10% range(less or more)


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I have a lot of experience in SMS but not as much in other payment solutions.

I must say that our customers are very happy with our SMS solutions though. The one that seems to be the best for users is the subscription method. Say a page want a user to subscribe to it's content, then we can in e.g. United Kingdom bill the user between 1.5£-15£ a day. And say a site gets 100 subscribers, that's 300£ if you charge say 3£ (quite typical amount) => 9000£ per month. Then of course there's the operators shares and stuff, but still there's very much money left for the site-manager in the end!

The thing with SMS is that many users believe paying with CC# etc feels insecure and that SMS is as simple as 1-2-3 and also they will be anonymous (what he paid for isn't specified on his invoice)


We have even gone so far that we have a site nowadays with SMS as the only payment option: http://www.smsvid.com

But in fact the site runs VERY well and we cash in a lot of $$$ with it (available in 9 countries today).

So my conclusion is:
* For bigger payments (100s of dollars range) SMS is not an option.

* For smaller one-time fees (like on smsvid.com) SMS is awesome.

* For subscriptions costing in range between a few pounds/dollars/euros up to around 10 £/$/? SMS is also perfect as the user doesn't have to do more than send in one tiny sms. (For webmasters this can means a lot of $$$ since they can build of thousands of members that continue to use the service and their member db will just grow and grow. I base this on my experience that a lot of users really stay with their subscriptions for at least some weeks but up to months and some forever)

My :2 cents:


If you have more questions or is interested in one of these solutions or another you have been thinking of, don't hesitate to drop me a mail!

Not significant but it depends where your visitors come from. SMS billing is available only in a couple of countries here in Europe. And expect to give up 40-50% as a fee to the SMS billing company (usually a telcom).

How come smsvid isn't available in Denmark? I know sms billing is big here..

Broda: One simple reason - directives from the mobile operators in Denmark - we aren't allowed to bill users for sex-related materials through SMS.

Sad enough, you're otherwise right about Denmark being huge in the SMS biz, they're really big!

I wish you could make it work in Portugal.

We have been negotiating with Portugese operators and we will in the future cover them too. I guess we are talking around 2003/2004 shift or something like that.

But it will come, be sure..

We have been using sms billing on our most of sites for around 10 months now. When we first started we only took a few bucks a month, seen an increase though the past 3 months, and rake a few hundred bucks each month per site. Easy money.
Downside, it takes forever to get paid out,
Not much control over pricing,
We are limited to 3 messages an hour etc,
and the country list is small. My own view is this kind of billing is going to take of more and more, but its needs more features, more control and better price options, oh yeah and a bigger country list.

We also setting up a "sms a model" Page to see how that wil go.

Give it a year or two and SMS billing will be bigger n better. :2 cents:

solonline: who are you consulting for you sms services? just interested since i want to know what they offer you and how we can compete with that.

we have 9 countries up and running and more coming all the time.

what's that you are talking about "limited to 3 messages an hour"? feels like nothing i've heard of before?!

no, sms is really hot, especially our adult subscription services we're running right now.. there we are not talking about hundreds of bucks per month, rather lots of thousands..

in short: yes, sms is the future if nothing else drastic happens!