Billing on Mobile

It comes as no surprise that Nokia will not have operator billing when it launches its Ovi App Store next month to a potential market of 50 million users on 25 devices (read the story in The Washington Post). Nokia had originally said that it would offer operator billing in nine countries including the US.

Why doesn’t this surprise us? Because at Bango, we know how hard it is to integrate directly with an operator and offer seamless mobile billing for content. Having a seamless billing experience will be really important for Ovi consumers and an opportunity to replace the rather poor experience of its Nokia Download Store with one that reflects the pre-eminent position Nokia has in the mobile marketplace.

It’s important not just to consumers who will appreciate the ease and speed of single click on phone bill payment but Nokia will benefit because the conversion rates are much higher. In our experience, a trusted brand should expect 30-70% of users to convert and Nokia should be a the top end of this range.

When it launches, the Ovi store will offer credit card payments. From our statistics, conversion rates are much lower at 10-20%. Its important for any app and content store to offer a variety of payment methods and provide on-bill payment as the default in countries where it’s available.



Don’t be fooled by the success of the iPhone App Store into thinking that there’s no point having operator billing. It would have been even more successful if it’d had AT&T billing wrapped into the store for its US consumers. T-Mobile must be thinking the same thing about the Android Marketplace!

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