Tuesday 10 July 2007

PayPal Mobile Checkout opens, PayForIt watch out

Picked up a story on Cellular News: PayPal Mobile Checkout Opens for Business. PayPal have launched their Mobile Checkout service to enable mobile commerce for it's merchants.

The solution that the UK mobile industry is touting for merchants wanting to get involved in m-commerce is PayForIt. This relies on mobile service providers like us to provide merchant processes that the operators accredit and therefore the consumer is supposed to trust.

I've searched for PayForIt again, as I have done frequently, and still nothing comes up. No one outside of the mobile industry has heard of it. How can consumers trust something they've never heard of?

Enter PayPal, most people have heard of them, especially the demographic who are purchasing using their mobile phone, immediately it's a trusted service.

They also enforce far, far lower processing charges for the merchants, and I really mean far, far lower.

PayPal is international, if your customer can access the mobile internet and has a PayPal account they can buy in whichever country they want. PayForIt is just UK.

You can probably see where this post is going and why we haven't bothered with PayForIt.

This is another example of the mobile operators just not getting the Internet. They want the sexiness and rapid evolution but have forgotten that the Internet model has been so successful because there are no controls. Without controls there is no opportunity to charge for access and other, more specialised and agile players can pick off the good bits, like merchant services.

I don't know what the answer is, people still want to talk and traditional voice calls are still the best way to do that. Though if the current trend to provide mobile broadband continues, services like Truphone might take that away from them as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

www.payforituk.com

There are already some big brands using Payforit, some since last year.