On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, James Santagata wrote:
> I don't see why it would be so difficult to circumvent the mobile
> operators. It still seems that customers could use a 3rd party billing
> systems, ibill, hereuare, etc. These could be activated through a
> number of ways, such as prepay, web-based access, external 900/888
> dialing, etc.
Well, looking back at the Internet experience, I think that people (at
least in the U.S. and similar markets) don't take so well to third-party
payment systems. I've seen a lot of these come and go, and in the end
pretty much everybody is still using the MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone
Order) credit card model, where you give the merchant your credit card
information directly. There's a fairly per-transaction cost overhead
to this (on the order of several tens of cents for even the very
smallest transaction), and thus the lack of low-cost (under a few
dollars) services on the net. Forget micropayments; we can't even do
minipayments.
The one exception to this is PayPal, but that came about not for
small payments, but because of the difficulty of acquiring a credit
card merchant account; PayPal is filling the need for individual to
individual payments, and that's mostly what it's used for.
Part of this may be due to the consumer tendency to prefer flat-rate
payments to per-use payments; people like to know in advance how much
something is going to cost them, even when (or perhaps because) they
don't know in advance how much they'll use a service. That's probably
one of the reasons for the success of the Docomo billing system; people
are comfortable knowing that they'll pay a fixed, small amount per month
for something.
So I don't hold out a lot of hope for third-party billing systems.
Basically, consumers already have enough different ways of paying
for things (various credit cards, two or more phone bills [fixed and
mobile], etc.) that they really don't want to add more. Any merchant
that can piggyback on a payment system that the consumer already is
using has a much better chance of making sales.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Sat Sep 28 08:54:56 2002