SMS and MicroPayments

As micropayments grow popular, charging for content might increase

[cyberair]

SMS payments are becoming a viable alternative to charging micropayments of $.25 to $.99. Although not so quite popular in the United States, Europe and Latin America is very familiar with the technology and it is incorporated into much of its marketing and sales.

Have any of you with high quality content or digital products tried to identify your european and latin american visitors and redirected them to a page for payment to access the content? I've seen some pages that charge $.99 or .99 euros for one day access or a $30 monthly subscription. They pay through SMS.

[rpendry]

I'd also be very interested to hear of any advice or experience anyone has of using SMS as a micropayment scheme, particularly for accessing premium content on a site.

This is something we're considering trialling on our websites in the near future, and we now have the geo-targetting necessary to identify which visitors come from which country.

A couple of questions:

* What would be the easiest method of ensuring that a weekly password to a protected area of the site is not shared or passed around amongst a large group of people? Is it possible to prevent that or is it something we might have to accept?

* What would be the simplest way to prevent abuse of individual phone numbers and accounts?

ANY advice - or warnings - gratefully received!

Cheers
Rich

[superbird]

* What would be the easiest method of ensuring that a weekly password to a protected area of the site is not shared or passed around amongst a large group of people? Is it possible to prevent that or is it something we might have to accept?

To some extent I think you might have to accept it. However, you could run some sort of affiliate program to encourage people to sell your site to their friends rather than give it away. Or you could work hard on the community aspect of the site so people feel bad about costing you money. But remember that someone showing their girlfriend or one or two mates is probably gong to be more beneficial than harmful

* What would be the simplest way to prevent abuse of individual phone numbers and accounts?

What do you mean here? (I've had some beer so I might be being a bit thick!)

[veroxii]

What would be the easiest method of ensuring that a weekly password to a protected area of the site is not shared or passed around amongst a large group of people? Is it possible to prevent that or is it something we might have to accept?

Just thinking out loud here. How about this. It will probably only work for short access - or session access. But we are talking *micro* payments. ;-)

1. User clicks on "buy access".
2. User gets directed to a page with an sms number to text, and an "enter activation code" entry box.
3. User sends txt message and receives a random activation code, which the server keeps track of as valid.
4. User enters his code.
5. Now the server sets a cookie for that user that will last the day or till the end of the session, and forwards him to the relevant content.
6. The server marks the activation code as invalid internally and can not be used again.

-V