Payment methods of mobile operators

With the popularity of smart phones, major businesses are also targeting mobile payment. Mobile payment actually covers a series of products and mechanisms, and the whole value chain also involves many interests, including mobile operators, service providers, equipment manufacturers, major merchants, end users and so on. What are the forms of mobile payment? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different payment forms? On these issues, a special research group of Business Insider released a report, which we sorted out as follows.

First of all, we define mobile payment as a system that allows users to purchase goods or services directly through mobile devices, or realize currency exchange by using various specific technologies for mobile devices. There are four main forms of mobile payment:

The operator's billing payment mode means that the whole payment process is arranged by the operator. The working principle of this mode of mobile payment is that the user authorizes a payment behavior (usually by SMS).

Mobile operators that provide services to users will help users handle the whole payment process and extract some profits. The payment fee will be directly included in the mobile phone bill.

For example, a charity or TV advertiser asks you to reply specific content to a certain number by SMS, which is the mobile payment paid by the operator.

Advantages One of the advantages of this payment method is that it is very convenient for consumers. They only need to send a text message to authorize, and they can complete the transaction.

Another advantage of this payment method is that the media threshold of this payment method is very low. For those users who don't have bank cards or credit card accounts, they can also enjoy this service. This payment method is not only applicable in developing countries, but also in developed countries, such as teenagers who usually do not have bank cards or credit cards.

Disadvantages However, operator billing also has two disadvantages:

Operators usually take most of the profits, sometimes as high as 15% to 50%. There is a historical reason for this phenomenon: before the arrival of the iPhone era, operators completely controlled the relationship with end users, so they could set prices arrogantly. Because the operator controls the whole value chain, the commission charged is usually very high, and the application scope of this payment method is limited to some extent. However, apart from this reason, there is another reason:

The billing of operators depends on how the business between major companies and operators is discussed. At present, there is no particularly good API that allows a company to easily complete transactions with customers through operator billing. For a company, if it wants to reach a large enough audience and provide such a payment method, it means that it needs to talk about its cooperation plan with operators one by one, and the cost is not low.