As far as online payments go, you can’t beat PayPal. All you need is an email address, and you can send money to pretty much anyone – or accept payment yourself. But that’s no good when you’re out and about.
Inevitably, perhaps, PayPal have now launched a mobile phone version. If you’ve got a mobile phone, you can pay pretty much anyone else with a mobile phone. Send money to friends and family, pay for goods or donate to charity with your thumb.
From the blurb:
Send money securely, anytime, from wherever you are. You don’t need cash or a check – just your phone. You just have to set up a PayPal account, activate your phone, and then text the amount and recipient’s phone number to 729725 (PAYPAL).
There are also Text-to-Buy shortcodes available for your own retail services. At the gig I went to the other night, there was a range of t-shirts, CDs and stickers available.
With a text-to-buy facility, I could (and probably would) have bought more in the way of merchandise than the remaining pocket change at the end of the night (that had not already been allocated for beer consumption) would allow.
I could simply have texted the word ‘dufus’ to 63336 (or whatever) and that would allocate the correct money from my PayPal account (and therefore my standard bank account) to the vendor, and I could have walked home with my new virtually pain-free purchases in hand.
It’s just one more way to encourage the punters to engage with your music product in an economic fashion. And we’re broadly in favour of that idea, right?
I think it’s certainly something that it’s worth vendors offering, even if you don’t actually get many people using it just yet. At least you might get a few people asking “what does that mean?”, then eventually people will become more aware of the service and will activate their PayPal mobile accounts.
It certainly provides a good way to avoid paying ridiculous amounts to mobile phone networks for mobile payments!
I like it, a lot. And a perfect example from yourself there. This could be the start of something big.