Mobile Micropayments

There has been a debate on one of the mobile forums recently about the best way to take micro-payments on mobile phones.

Micro payments are becoming more important as mobile users need to pay for small items - ringtones, wall papers or even content, such as music.

There are essential 3 options:
Premium SMS
Credit Cards
Non-operator billing

Premium SMS
Pros
It's easy, seamless and fast - you can take a payment and deliver content in a single message
Cons
The operators take a large chunk of the money (around 30% depending on the tariff)
It's not world wide (you need codes for each country)

Credit Cards
Pros
Fairly universal and you can take from small to large amounts
Cons
Difficult from a user perspective on mobile. It requires either web access or a difficult and time consuming WAP site

Non-operator billing
These are systems where mobile users will purchase some kind of 'credit' using credit cards or paypal
Pros
Can be universal, better payouts for content providers
Cons
Require pre-registration

All in all, in spite of it's problems, premium SMS is the best method for delivering content, simply because it's the one that mobile users will actually use.

There are additional problems, however:
in the UK premium SMS does not support WAP push
UK mobile networks additionally charge for the data