Payment options: The More Extensive, The Better

It seems that the majority of our customers can, at times, get confused over whether to use PSMS, prepaid cards or IVR as the main payment options for their premium content online. They ponder their options in order to determine how they should maximize revenues, taking into consideration conversion rates and payouts. Our approach to this discussion is always clear: each payment option will provide a higher commercial contribution to their revenues than any potential cannibalization rate.

Recently, OPQA www.opqa.com, a 100% Spanish multiplayer online gaming platform (and an Allopass customer for quite some time now) has been reviewing its options in order to try and increase revenues. When we sat down for our regular review, the options became clear: revenue growth can be achieved either by increasing the audience or by increasing ARPU (average revenue per user). As increasing the audience is essentially a long term strategy, we concentrated on trying to increase the ARPU and proposed that they start including additional methods of payment as a test. We consequently aggregated the IVR at fixed cost (905 numbers in Spain) and ran this alongside the current PSMS offer.

The results after almost a month of this new approach were both surprising and revealing. The revealing element was that sales coming in from IVR solutions increased steadily to provide 21% of all revenues. The surprising part was that the revenues from PSMS remained unchanged.

What is the conclusion of all this? Primarily – it is that by increasing the payment options available clients will not suffer from revenue cannibalization. On the contrary, users seem to find their preferred method of payment when they are exposed to a wider range of payment solutions.

Therefore, it is always worthwhile to talk honestly and openly to your providers in order to try and find new methods of increasing revenues.