Friday, February 13, 2009

Not Exactly!!!

There seems to be a new alternative payment solution showing up on the scene every day. This week, two new ones appeared. Mazooma and Noca. Where do they get these names from? I visited both sites and right off the bat there is a huge difference here. It is obvious that Mazooma is the more sophisticated company, at least from a marketing perspective. Noca's messaging is clearly techy orientated. What is "not exactly"? I have to pick on Mazooma's messaging. They claim you are paying in "real time". Well, need I say more? Awhile back I tried and commented on another player in this realm, eBillMe. While I was impressed, I experienced the downside of these solutions compared to paying with a Credit or Check card. The merchant is not going to release the merchandise until they actually get the money which is probably going to take 2-4 days. I bought something from Buy.com and since I was paying with eBillMe, the merchant put my order into a pending status whereas if I had paid with a Credit or Check card, they would have immediately released it for shipment. As it turned out, therefore, they ran out by the time they got the funds (or notified confidently enough that the funds were on the way) and I had to wait over a week for them to replenish their stock and ship the item.

The bigger question for all of these types of solutions is will the customer bite? Will they want to enroll and manage yet another account with another username/password for a service they will likely only be able to use at smaller merchants and therefore it has minimal utility.

Final note, I enrolled in Mazooma and of course, their email confirmation back to me got trapped by my ATT/Yahoo webmail SPAM filter. Surprised?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Www.Autositebill.com is a service that offers a better approach based on the MasterCard RPPS bill payment network that eBillMe, Mazooma and Noca uses.

Customers using their www.mWorldPay.com mobile wallet account first prefund their mobile wallet and then use the mobile funds to initiate a real time (within secs) transaction at the merchant website. Customers, among many options available, may prefund their account using their online Bank bill payment facilities.

You should check out www.Autositebill.com and compare to these three alternative payment gateways that you have aleady look at. You just migt be pleasantly suprise.

SKlebe said...

Thanks for sharing. I went and looked at your site. I am sure this is viable for certain niche markets but do not see it as a mainstream alternative. What is the pricing?

Unknown said...

Payment is a two sides market, may be the first target for these news systems are the merchants first.It is the merchants who pay the transaction fees.

digital signatures said...

I think payment is the real issue for those who are working. I find your post informative as it describe two styles of payment. I agree with you that Mazooma follows the better approach. I visited both the sites and reached to this conclusion.