SMS-billing: the new age payment system
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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
Be attractive for potential members!! Sounds pretty banal…. It is quite a logical assumption that a ‘busy’ site is a synonym to success. The more members surf through your site – the more traffic they generate, thus making the site very attractive for advertisers. Not to mention the direct flow of funds from your site members who pay for subscriptions. And behind all that stands a carefully chosen site concept that will allow you to find your niche in the competitive world of dating industry. How does SkaDate help? Well, in many ways.
‘Divide and rule’ What would that mean in terms of running a dating site? Right now we are speaking about the policy of managing the membership types intended to motivate your site members for subscribing to paid plans – thus, to increasing your funds. The membership types system in SkaDate software is perfectly optimized for you to ‘play’ with site services by making some (or even all) of them available only to a certain membership. This will inspire Free members to go for subscription in order to be able to experience the full range of helpful and entertaining 
Advertise, Advertise and… Advertise!!! An essential part of your ‘profit-aimed’ strategy is advertising, so we have come up to the most important component of your success-building. Let’s say, your site conception does not stipulate a paid membership system, at least at the beginning when you need to get your site live and full of members. Does that mean that you will have to operate at a loss? Not at all. The Google Almighty is there to help. It offers you a tool to make your site a profitable business. That is Google AdSense. All you need to do is place the text, image or video advertisement administered by Google onto your website and get paid on a per-click or per-impression basis. Yes, it is that simple!
Time to succeed! Now that you have chosen a path of online dating industry to follow, you will see how interesting, exciting, partly complicated, but satisfying this venture can be. The main advice is ‘test and analyze’. Don’t be afraid to play with the software opportunities and ways to attract potential members. Carefully study the response to each step of your marketing strategy, make conclusions, try new advertising moves and be confident about the result.
