What is mobile commerce

With the new year, many mobile operators have begun to actively introduce a new payment service, which is a mixture of Premium SMS (short numbers) and payment using a plastic card. Mobile commerce (similar to e-commerce) is now available to subscribers of the big three (MTS, Beeline, Megafon) and Smarts. How everything is arranged and how to connect the payment system to your project.



Technology inherited work from short numbers via SMS, and plastic cards from freedom to choose the payment amount and tools to track its status.
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Principle of operation

1. A phone number is entered on the store's website (at the stage of filling out a profile during registration or in the order form of goods)
2. Through the payment aggregator, the store sends a request with the amount and phone number
3. The subscriber (customer in the store) will receive an SMS message with the purchase data: Specify the product, the amount to be paid.
4. If the subscriber agrees with the payment, he responds to the SMS.
5. The store system receives a request from the aggregator to successfully complete the payment operation.

The advantages of this method of receiving payments

1. The possibility of paying any amount (for example, 183.56 rubles), which was impossible to organize using short numbers.
2. Significantly lower commission compared with short numbers (13-30% instead of 50-60%).
3. High availability of payment method. Paying from a mobile phone that is always at hand is a familiar and easy action. As easy as answering an SMS.
4. Lack of fraud. While using short numbers, it seemed quite natural that SMS was not secured with money, then when paying through mobile commerce, such a situation cannot arise in principle. Each transaction has its own id, status. In case of insufficient funds on the subscriber’s account, the payment will not pass.
5. Low number of erroneous SMS. Since the technology works on the principle of “Response SMS”, it is very difficult to make a mistake when typing. In any case, less than if a person sent an SMS to a short number, dialing a keyword and a long code.

disadvantages

1. The service is available to subscribers so far that only 4 operators (the number of operators supporting this type of payment is gradually increasing)

comparison table

Payment type	Mobile commerce	Short numbers
Maximum amount of payment *	10 000 rub.	300 rub.
Free payment amount	Yes	Not
Guaranteed payment	Yes	Not
Average amount of payment deductions	87%	50%
Probability of subscriber's error when sending SMS	Low	Average
Prevalence of service	4 operators	Almost all operators of the Russian Federation

As a percentage, we can talk about 82-85% of the availability of mobile commerce for subscribers, if we take the total market share of MegaFon, MTS, Beeline and Smarts.

Mobile commerce on the Internet is used by large online projects (for example, Grupon, Biglion, and other coupon startups). Now any online store or startup can connect this service using AvisoSMS ; it is enough to apply and integrate the API to form invoices for the phones of their customers.

API features

We, as supporters of the full integration of services, have made a convenient API. Using it, the payment process excludes transfers to our website, setting checkboxes, entering captcha, specifying emails, etc.

In the parameters of the request to create an account, you can specify from whom to take a commission: from the subscriber or from the store.

Payment can be made in two modes - “code + number” or “reply SMS”. This may vary by partner when submitting a request. In the first case, the response will return the code and the short number to which it should be sent. For example, "22022 to number 84971"

If you use “Reply SMS”, the subscriber will receive the message: “To confirm the payment. Ticket to the cinema # 3122 at the price of 118.00.

The session of each payment lives 20 minutes, then automatically closes with the status “Not paid”.

There is a test mode, thanks to which you can change the status of a payment in your account by working and checking the actions of the system, while the connection request is coordinated with the operators.

To all the functionality there is documentation .