SMS-billing: the new age payment system
June 18, 2009 – 11:43 am, by Irene @ Skalfa
Although introduced not so long ago, the sms-billing service has been coming to the fore among the well-known and trustworthy payment methods. What is the reason for its growing popularity?
It’s pretty easy to explain by turning to any customer’s psychology: they want to get goods and services quickly, safely and not having to go through a 
number of sophisticated steps. SMS-billing meets all these requirements providing security along with mobility. No need to expose the credit card details, no need to wait for the transaction to be completed – with sms-payment you get what you want instantly, no need to think about cash – short messages are relatively cheap, and you take these expenses as a part of your monthly telephone bill (which is also an important psychological aspect).
This payment method is convenient and beneficial not only for consumers (site members in our case), but also for vendors. First of all, if you are on the second team, it gives you an opportunity to make the subscription for your site easier and more affordable. Imagine the situation with a Free member, who receives an offer from another user to chat tête-a-tête, but his membership does not include the private messaging service. Most people being in his shoes would prefer paying only for this particular feature (by pressing a few buttons on their mobile device and getting instant access to the desired service) as opposed to purchasing the monthly membership through one of the online payment providers, which would take more time, trouble and funds. Well, I would… as well as the major part of the European countries’ population. It does not mean that sms-payments have to be a substitute for your traditional membership plans, but they can be a great add-on to the process of monetizing your online dating business. A simple calculation shows that depending on the number of your site members and the fee you set up for the site services, you could get hundreds to thousands dollars daily on top of income from subscriptions.
Representing a well-known software company – which is SkaDate – I can’t help saying a few words about how we follow the sms-boom tendency developing new features for our community script and dating software. SkaDate 7 dating software programmers introduced a number of new useful features for members, including the sms-billing. For now it does not cover a wide range of site services: only ‘hot list’ and ‘24-hour trial membership’. We are studying the response of our audience (since our product is mostly USA-oriented) in order to decide if we should go ahead with expanding this feature. But in case you decide to be on the pacesetters team offering the sms-billing service on their sites to show all its advantages to the members, SkaDate team will gladly help you with this. There are 2 world-famous sms-payment providers already integrated into our script: DaoPay and Zong. So to customize the software for adding more items into the list of site features paid by sms will be a lot easier (since the sms billing system itself is 
already present in the program). You could modify the script by yourself (if you have enough coding knowledge), or leave that to our high-skilled developers team. Another option is visiting the SkaDate Certified Specialists website – the guys who know the product really well and provide high quality assistance on any script modifications.
Logically, we have come up to the moment, where I should start speaking about the disadvantages of using sms-billing for your online venture. One is that this payment method is yet to strike root in the USA, where people still prefer tried-and-true PayPal, CCBill and Authorize.net… And for now I can’t think of any more cons, so if you have thoughts on this aspect – you are most welcome to share them by leaving the post comments.
I am looking forward to reading your responses!
Best wishes,
Irene
6 Responses to “SMS-billing: the new age payment system”
Sms billing have long been the “next big thing”.
Im a bit sad that only 24 hour and hotlist is supported ( what is the hotlist thing ? )
Ok – you are an american based company – but all over europe sms billing is HUGE.
By only having 2 billing solutions, that is mostly focused on america, and only 24 hour membership plan, im sadly forced to have a certified developer add this for me
By casper on Jun 23, 2009
Hello Casper,
Yes, I agree that at the moment the number of features supporting SMS-payment in SkaDate is not large. But as I wrote in my post, we are carefully studying the reaction of our target audience to adding this new payment system into the script. This is why your opinion is extremely important. I would also advise you to visit Skalfa Board ( http://www.skalfa.com/boards/feature-suggestions-b2.0/ ) and suggest including new features for SMS-billing in one of our upcoming revisions.
We hope that shortly SkaDate software will be able to meet all your expectations. Thank you for expressing your opinion.
By Irene on Jun 28, 2009
And, oh… by the way, ‘Hotlist’ is a feature allowing your site members to have their profile placed to the sidebar of the index page in one of the top positions (in other words, to the ‘Hot’ profiles list). Nice feature for those who want to get the maximum attention from their potential matches
By Irene on Jun 28, 2009
I completely agree with Kasper. He said everything I wanted to say. I’m from a small European country and this people rarely use the credit/debit card for payment over the Internet, and all adult and dating sites here carry out payment via SMS and phone.
By Romantik on Nov 17, 2009
Hi Irene,
I would like to introduce Zaypay.com, maybe we can talk about intergration. Our services are similar as Daopay and Zong, but generally have better payout rates.
Regards,
Robert
By Robert on Dec 11, 2009