World Telemedia: Payforit doesn’t do it
Rating: doomed
By Annie Turner
Payforit, the British payment scheme for digital items up to GBP5 which has so far only adopted by O2, came in for some stick at the What Are New Billing Technologies Doing For Content Sales? conference session here in Prague yesterday.
It was set up to stop the recurrence of content subscription rip-offs (you know, you buy a ringtone and then are charged XX a month forever because you can’t stop it) and give the public confidence.
Well in the first place the public hasn’t got a clue and couldn’t careless about Payforit.
In the second place, as panellist Oliver Ripley, senior product manager, Tania Mobile, pointed out that many content providers who’ve been running a successful business for years using premium rate SMS have the attitude of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
In the third place, as a very persistent member of the audience asked, “Why does it take four clicks before the user gets to hand any money over?” The panellist from O2 had quite a bit of trouble giving any sensible answer to that one – clearly he’s on the committee responsible for developing Payforit. O2 man also insisted that his company had not seen a drop in revenues as a result. The persistent man in the audience insisted lots of content providers have.
In the fourth place, the plan is that Payforit would be ubiquitous in the UK market, but only O2 has signed up and there is no guarantee the others will, although they supported its development.
In the fifth place, there’s are lots of outstanding issues such as the opt-in page isn’t optional (which seems to wind a lot of content providers up because they haven’t got terms equivalent to the operators who are allowed to use CRM to market to customers who’ve agreed to it once and don’t have to agree to receive material every time). Also scheme rules only compel content providers to offer an email address, not a phone number, in case of any problems.
And ultimately, who cares? The credit card companies are beginning to get their teeth into mobile and online and elsewhere credit cards are being used for ever smaller amounts.
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