Most sites are best served by the latest online m-commerce tools, which combine the flexibility of displaying merchandise on your own site with offloading the heavy-duty banking and money-transfer functions to close the deal. Most web designers agree that the best ways for individuals and small to mid-size businesses to add m-commerce are to use a company that includes a shopping cart and transaction service or to combine a dedicated shopping cart with a transaction service. In the following sections, we introduce you to companies that offer m-commerce services.
Amazon Payments
This powerful and flexible payment engine allows users who are already familiar with, and trust, the Amazon brand to purchase goods from your website by using their Amazon customer ID. The advantage is that Amazon has established itself as one of the biggest retailers on the web, and its technological backbone is very strong.
The downside, however, is that your customers have to already have an account with Amazon; otherwise, they’re forced to create one when they make their first payment. As you can see in Figure 10-8, the Amazon brand is all over every page (on the buttons, in the colors, and in the typography), which helps your customers know they’re dealing with a reputable firm @@md but that also means Amazon promotes itself all over your site.
Still, if you sell digital downloads, such as ringtones, MP3s, videos, or pictures, Amazon’s payment and pricing system is innovative and robust. And if you already sell your stuff on Amazon, it’s very easy to integrate the links and payment system on your website because customers who have already paid with Amazon at your m-commerce store can buy with just one click. The Amazon site has detailed instructions for both amateurs looking for the simplest solution and seasoned developers looking to customize.
iTunes
As of this writing, iTunes is still limited in what it sells, restricting anyone using the service to music, videos, and iPhone/iPad applications. You must submit your digital goods to iTunes for review before they can be listed on the site, and Apple’s approval process can take a few days or even weeks.
But with more than 100 million credit card accounts on file (outnumbering even the 94 million Amazon customers or the 75 million PayPal customers), speculation is rife that Apple will extend its iTunes checkout processing technology to allow merchants to sell their stuff to customers who want to pay via their existing iTunes accounts. And iTunes provides digital goods for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, so the combined audience is significant.
PayPal
PayPal is highly customizable and offers a wide range of services, broad international e-commerce support, and everything from simple one-click buttons to high-end transaction services that you can integrate into most of the popular shopping cart services.
At the high end, you need quite a bit of technical coding skills to tweak PayPal’s API to work with third-party shopping carts, but PayPal has been around for a long time, so you can draw on a large international developer network when you need help. At the low end, you can easily add PayPal buttons. See the section “Creating a simple PayPal Buy button,” later in this chapter.
As with Amazon, the PayPal brand is the one your customers see on each Buy button when it comes time to make their payments.
PayPal has also created some extremely powerful and extensible technology to allow people to transform their cellphones into wallets. And because PayPal is owned by eBay, the integration between the two services is quite good. If you’re selling your items through your eBay store, this may be all you need.
PayPal is developing interesting extensions on its iPhone app. Not only can users transfer money directly from one phone to the other by bumping together the two phones, but a new service also uses GPS location data to allow users to find businesses on a map and send money directly to those businesses.
Google Checkout
https://checkout.google.com/sell
Google has spent enormous amounts of time and money developing a whole host of other products and services to go along with its core business of being the top search engine on the planet. We discuss setting up Google Checkout later in this chapter because of the wide panoply of other products and services that Google has @@md most especially Google’s recent acquisition of the mobile advertising company AdMob for $750 million. Spending that kind of money is a clear indication that Google takes the mobile web seriously, and that it’s going to continue to devote significant time and resources to ensuring that its existing products are mobile-friendly.
Google Checkout is easy to set up, and because it piggybacks on Google’s massive network of server farms, it loads quickly @@md no matter where on Earth your user accesses your m-commerce site from (not an insignificant consideration as billions of people come online via their mobile devices).
Like PayPal, you can use Google Checkout to add a Buy Now button to your site, to set up a simple shopping cart and transaction package in one, or to use Google for the transaction processing in combination with any number of shopping carts that are designed to work with Google. (Some shopping carts can be integrated with PayPal, Google, or both if you want to give customers the option.)
If you use Google Checkout, the downside, similar to Amazon, is that your customers have to already have an account with Google; otherwise, they’re forced to create one when they make their first payment. The Google brand is what your customers will see when they make their payments; the buttons will have the Google logo on them, the color scheme will look like the color scheme that is used by Google, the words “Fast checkout through Google” will appear on the screen, along with a link that says “What is Google Checkout?” and leads to a page that’s all about Google Checkout. Another possible downside for you may be that Google Checkout doesn’t support currency in as many countries as PayPal. What Google Checkout does is to use the conversion rates of the major credit cards to perform the currency conversion, primarily to U.S. dollars, euros, and British pounds sterling. If your buyers are in one of the supported countries (and the list of countries has grown significantly in just the last year), a currency conversion calculator from Citibank pops up to show them what the price actually is in their local money.
Dozens of e-commerce shopping cart providers have made a special effort to ensure that they integrate cleanly with Google Checkout. If you want to use a more sophisticated shopping cart than the one provided by Google, you can view Google’s recommended list of third-party vendors in the Integration Partners section on its website at https://checkout.google.com/seller/integrate_cart.html.
TIP: If you use Google Checkout, Google offers a couple other features that can tie into your Google Checkout system:
- Google also has a wizard that allows you to easily convert a Google Docs spreadsheet into a shopping cart and even an embeddable store. If you have a Google ID, you can use Google Docs to create a spreadsheet via the web. Basically, in Google Docs, you fill the spreadsheet with any data you want to include about your products, including descriptions, pictures, pricing info, and so on. Then, run the store gadget wizard at to convert your spreadsheet into a shopping cart.
- Google Analytics allows you to track page traffic information, such as how many users come to your site, which items are most popular, and how much time visitors spend on each page.
Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com/
If you’re looking for the most advanced online commerce solution, the sophisticated ecommerce platform, Magento (www.magentocommerce.com) has rolled out a highly customizable mobile shopping cart with robust features.
High-end shopping cart services like Magento can be complex to install and set up, but if you sell a lot of items, want to track sales across many channels, or need your online system to be integrated with your brick-and-mortar inventory system, you may find Magento well worth the cost. Magento supports many transaction services, including Google, PayPal provide, and most banks that offer online merchant services.
asknet
This large, international e-commerce company is based in Germany. asknet offers custom-built mobile sites and high-end m-commerce.
asknet is partnered with many Internet security companies and software retailers, and the company specializes in handling m-commerce across international boundaries. asknet provides support for multiple currencies, tax laws, delivery of goods, and customer tracking. Videos on their site explain how their service works.
asknet also has a network of warehouses that can handle fulfillment, so you can use it to store your merchandise and handle shipping around the world. asknet even burns CDs/DVDs, applies your labels, sticks them into jewel cases, and delivers them to your customers if you sell digital merchandise. As you might expect, asknet is far from the cheapest solution; it doesn’t even list its prices on its site, but you can contact asknet for more information.
CardinalCommerce
CardinalCommerce, shown in Figure 10-9, has partnered with Sprint to provide the back-end payment solution for the new Sprint Mobile Wallet. Although CardinalCommerce formerly specialized in handling large transactions for major multinational corporations, it has made a concerted effort to reach out to small- and medium-size businesses, and its partnership with Sprint is intriguing.
Unlike AT&T’s entry into the mobile commerce space (covered in the next section), Sprint and CardinalCommerce are not trying to force merchants and shoppers to buy things by adding the sales price to the user’s existing cellphone bill. Instead, the Sprint Mobile Wallet aggregates your existing payment methods @@md PayPal, Amazon Payments, MasterCard, and Visa, for example @@md in one place, and allows you to choose which one you want to use to pay for something.
As of this writing, the Sprint Mobile Wallet is brand-new and mostly untested. However, Sprint claims it has designed this payment system so that mobile developers can process transactions quickly and easily on their sites, and the Sprint handsets available as of late 2011 will all come preloaded with the Sprint Mobile Wallet. Sprint also plans to make its Mobile Wallet service available to users on other phone carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon, by creating apps and web-based plug-ins that allow designers and developers to access the service. Check the CarnialCommerce site for the latest developments and offerings if you’re considering this service.
Boku and AT&T
Not to be outdone, days after Sprint announced its partnership with CardinalCommerce, AT&T announced that it would team up with startup company Boku to provide mobile payments. The difference is that rather than charging transactions to a credit card or bank account, Boku (shown in Figure 10-10) utilizes the user’s cellphone account to pay for the transaction. That is, rather than getting a bill from Visa at the end of the month, the charge shows up on your phone bill.
Although most users in developed countries are probably not in favor of anything that actually makes their cellphone bill bigger, the advantage of Boku is that it has massive worldwide coverage, via partnerships with carriers in more than 60 countries. Boku even allow users with prepaid phone cards and accounts (pretty much the standard in Third World countries) to pay for goods and services via mobile transfers. If you’re marketing around the world, Boku is a strong competitor. Boku is moving aggressively to line up deals with carriers in the United States; it signed an agreement with Verizon, using the BilltoMobile service, to add carrier billing (although it’s also working on direct integration with the giant mobile phone company).
However, the disadvantage to Boku is similarly large. Although credit card companies take between 2 and 6 percent of the transaction as their fee, Boku and the carriers carve out 35 percent. They claim that because the conversion rate for transactions with Boku is 60 percent compared with 7 percent for credit-card transactions, vendors will actually come out ahead. This figure is hotly disputed by credit card companies.