Taking payments via SMS
 

Hey guys,

Anyone know of any places that allow you to charge consumers and allow them to take the payment via SMS. Ive heard of PIN submit methods, where they put in their phone number and a verification code is texted to them, then they input that into the site and the payment is stacked on their phone bill. Aka, PIN submits.

Ive seen a company charge 30%! + $.075/per transaction.. thats crazy!

Has anyone had any similar experiences or know of any alternative options?

Thanks

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

SMS was never meant to be a payment option.

If you are looking into mobile payments you should look for NFC solutions.

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

I'm not sure I've ever seen this before. I know pay pal had/has this option but I'm not sure of their fees.

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

There are a lot of solutions for payments via SMS and direct carrier billing. I assume that you're talking about payment for a non-card-present transaction? NFC might be a solution for card-present transactions, but not the type of transaction that would typically require premium-rate SMS payment (PRS).

As you already mentioned, the transaction fees are substantial. You'll be lucky if you pay just 30%... it's more likely to be 40+% until you're doing enough volume to have your own premium-rate codes. Until then you'll be paying the carriers (typically 30+%) and an aggregator, and a payment gateway. At volume you can eliminate the payment gateway, but not likely the aggregator.

Different countries and carriers will have different margins. Some are borderline extortionist. Most would be considered outrageously expensive by credit card processing standards. But it's just standard for the industry.

What you give up in significantly higher fees, you can make up for in conversion rates. It's a much lower friction payment process. And it can dramatically improve your conversion rate if done right.

Some resources to check out:

bango.com
text2pay.com
smscoin.com

Somewhere I've got a list of a bunch of alternative payment processors for mobile. If that would be of value, let me know and I'll dig it up.

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

Paypal is the best solution for payments. Just use Paypal instead.

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

Yes but having the ease of payment process with a PIN submit rather than someone ( on their cell phone mind you ) whipping out their credit card for a small service fee my site charges. The original idea was to charge .99/per action* but since the fees are OUTRAGEOUS, Ive had to go back to the drawing board and up that to $3.99 or even 9.99 ( and if this includes monthly rebilling thats better) but now I have to justify the 9.99/MONTH vs the .99/per transaction. but having the ease of processing payments is what im looking for.

Thanks for the info guys, very helpful :)

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

My company is involved in premium sms services and quite frankly, premium sms in the USA has never lived up to its potential. There are some other very good billing mechanisms, especially in Canada, that you should consider in addition to premium sms.

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

"...$.075/per transaction.. thats crazy!" Really CRAZY!

Re: Taking payments via SMS
 

Paypal can take payments via SMS but the customer has to send a specific text to a short code.

Information can be found here.

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mp...le/mobile-text

I tried to set up Twilio today so that someone could text a keyword to a Twilio phone number and text back an amount they would like to donate. Everything worked great except for forwarding the text message to the Paypal short code. I soon learned that Twilio does not allow for a text message to be sent to a non-Twilio short code so the app didn't work.