Thursday, October 12, 2006 Toral: Online payment for individuals By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
Ever since I started writing about online payment, I’ve been getting inquiries on how they can use the system.
Here are some situations:
Tony works at home doing logo and web design for companies in the Philippines. His clients are slow to pay and some even change their mind, cancel the order, after he has done the work.
BeadClubPhilippines.com offers bead jewelry by its members and tries selling it through auction sites. The site gets requests from other countries, but buyers are reluctant to pay through credit card or send money through remittance service until their orders are delivered.
A friend sells local music in CDs online and accept credit card payments using an Internet payment service provider (IPSP) in the United States. They send checks as payment but have to pay the charge of $5 dollars each time. If this friend doesn’t have significant sales volume or profit margin, the charges can be too much to bear.
Checks sent by post take weeks to arrive and sometimes they go missing.
This also requires one to have a dollar bank account. For start-ups, most don’t have enough money to meet the minimum daily balance required of US dollar accounts.
There are very few IPSPs who can pay in pesos.
An ideal solution perhaps is a payment system that allows the seller to send bills to customers by email. This means that no matter how sales lead comes about, face to face, email or via website, a single payment facility is used.
To ensure meeting customer satisfaction and merchant protection, buyers pay a third party who holds the money. That way the buyer knows that the merchant will not get the money until the customer has confirmed receiving the item.
It also means that merchants know they will get paid when an item or service is delivered. For confirmed deliveries, payment can be made directly through a cash card so the money can be withdrawn from any ATM in the Philippines or deposited into one’s bank account.
The buyers should be able to pay by credit card issued in the Philippines and/or overseas banks. The merchant should only be made to pay transaction charges and there should be no weekly or monthly fees. That way there are no charges to pay when business is slow.
It will be good to have incentives too. If business takes off, then the merchant can get lower transaction fees.
As nothing is for free in this world and to minimize abuse by ill-intentioned individuals or merchants, there should be a registration verification process, perhaps setup fees. They should also be required to deposit a bond to cover customer refunds and charge-backs.
I think having these needs expressed now only shows that Filipino merchants are actually growing and evolving in the country.
I appreciate your insights or feedback to these ideas.
