The future of SMS billing
 

The SMS billing alternatives rocks lately, especially for european traffic. I have experiences with SDStelecom(british traffic) & nocreditcard's new sms billing services. Both working fine. European people aren't used to use creditcard, but they are very used to use their celluar phone. For example, in Czech Republic(my czech card isn't accepted by most cc processors) there are sth about 8,000,000 cellphones(that's 80% of population) and people uses them to pay for some services allready(for example, cinema tickets).
The other fact is, that cellphone operators are charging relatively high charges for SMS transactions, but it's not too high, when comparsed to cc processors fees. The cinema ticket cost is around $4 here & the operator fee(when paying by SMS) is about 30 cents for that.
What do you think about the future of SMS billing?

If it could be integrated into some kind of affiliate program more would try it I am sure as with other micro payment options.

... I am european, I am used to use my credit card and I have never ever done a payment via my cellphone and never will ... period.

but yes, you are right even a 5Mio $ US czech credit card would make it onto ibill' s scrublist and I guess this is where the problem is.

SMS Billing is simply still to expensive.

It costs over 20-30% in most countries, which is just stupid.

If the billing options would get more flexible and one could charge amounts up to 10 EUR and it would not cost more than 15% then it would get interesting.

The main problem on all this crap is that european countries ALL have _VAT_ which means that right there you already lose 15-25% just from VAT!

Isn't it a limit price tag on SMS? Something like $10 I think..correct me if I'm wrong. You can't buy a car with SMS..I'm shore.

Money can be made with EU traffic, but I think you need some volume, $0.5 per movie don't make you rich..

:glugglug

ok, cool..you know your shit.

:thumbsup

In Australia we have just got premium SMS services. It is currently capped at $5 per message. I have looked into the options and the payout rates here are just bullshit. For a $5 message the largest payout is about $2.70 per message on the Telstra network. The lowest payout is $1.31 per message on Vodafone network which equates to about a 74% transaction fee.

One good thing about SMS is that there is very few regulations in place as yet.

When you make an individual contract with each operator, you can push the transaction fee lower. And when rebilling is available(like at sdstelecom), it should be very interesting.