Telephone Billing

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

Has anyone had bad or good experiences using telephone billing? I was considering adding it as a payment option to my website, but I haven’t seen many sites that offer it yet.

Thanks

#2

Re: Telephone Billing

People still use telephone billing :slight_smile:
We still get sales via it anyway

http://www.gxbill.com/

#3

Re: Telephone Billing

[QUOTE=DrakeCameron;71269]Has anyone had bad or good experiences using telephone billing? I was considering adding it as a payment option to my website, but I haven’t seen many sites that offer it yet.

Thanks[/QUOTE]

A good 90% of the ccbill processed sites use it. We do. Youth (18yo+) don’t typically have a credit card, checking account, etc. And the closeted ones (for instance a husband who takes care of all the bills and his wife does whatever may use telephone billing and throw away the bill, then there’s no tracking of the purchase). So I would suggest offering it.
We’ve never had any chargebacks to date through telephone billing and have done some numbers on them.

#4

Re: Telephone Billing

Also, think about the fact that in some countries, credit cards are not that widely used as in the U.S.

In most European countries, a debit card is far more popular than a credit card. For people who do not travel, it’s not necessary to have a credit card at all.

The following statistics are from 2003 (so a bit outdated), but shows you the number of credit cards per thousand people:

Belgium… 296.2
Canada …1,505.9
Germany …227.9
Italy …345.2
Japan…1,820.1
Netherlands … 311.7
Singapore … 681.2
Sweden … 418.7
Switzerland …451.9
United Kingdom… 936.4
United States… 4,329.5

In Canada, Japan and the US, people seem to have multiple credit cards (4 per person in the US !!), while in most European countries not even 50% of the people owns a credit card. It’s because the payment system in those countries are different and based on debit cards and electronic wires.

From another research:

“Barely half of shoppers outside the US and Canada use credit cards for online purchases, compared with 75% in North America, according to research by Angus Reid. Cash on delivery and bank drafts are almost as popular as credit-card payments in Europe.”

#5

Re: Telephone Billing

Telephone billing for us brings a small amount of income. Look at it as bonus money though because it takes about 90 days before you will see any of it and it has a high chargeback ratio for us. Since it is non-recurring only, you will want to make it a fairly expensive single purchase option. A member can charge a membership to their phone number for three months and never pay the phone bill. The phone company will not pay if they don’t. This is less than 1% of our total sales. 20% of all phone billing charges are charged back.

#6

Re: Telephone Billing

We use GXBill and they are great, get in touch with Sam and he will set you up. Feel free to use me as a ref if you want too, HunkMoney has been working with GXBill for like 5 or more years.

Overall, phone billing brings us an extra 5-8% that we did absolutely no additional work to get, so yeah its well worth it.

#7

Re: Telephone Billing

Thanks for the feedback guys. I think we are going to try it out for awhile and see what comes of it.

Thanks again