Last week, we wrote about the growing importance of mobile operator partnerships in helping digital merchants acquire new users in emerging markets. Such partnerships are commonplace for streaming services. But for those companies who have not teamed up with carriers it’s important to know: how exactly do these deals work?

Having some of your customers face problems while making payments is an unavoidable issue. When troubleshooting such cases, there are two options: resolving the issue successfully and retaining the customer, or failing to do so in a timely manner and losing future revenue from them.

Providing good support has a direct impact on revenue: a recent study by Forrester claims companies with good customer support grow 5 times faster than those who provide mediocre assistance. Forrester’s study and other data points often make an indirect connection between revenue and customer support. With payments-related support, the connection is direct: failed payments or users demanding refunds mean the money is either never arriving in your bank account or about to leave it.

This white paper aims to give merchants an understanding on how Fortumo helps merchants with customer support and what merchants can do on their own to provide great customer support experiences to their own users.

Fill in your contact details below, download the white paper and take your customer support to the next level!

Building a successful digital business has a clear formula: build up a user base, create a product they are willing to pay for and retain those users for as long as possible.

Some companies do it better than others. Facebook has 2 billion active users, VK has 90 million. Netflix has 93 million paying users, Hulu has 12 million. Spotify has 50 million paying users, Pandora is at 5 million. Why?

Beside executing well on user acquisition, monetization and retention, a critical component of success is adapting when to market changes. Many companies no longer exist who failed to make the change from desktop to mobile and from web to apps. What’s the next big shift and how not to go defunct because of it?

Another month over and it’s time to recap the biggest payments, e-commerce, digital content and gaming stories of the month! Check out the overview below and don’t forget to download our latest market report on Latin America, as well as the infographic on deployment of carrier billing by the world’s leading digital companies.

In addition to the monthly news, KPCB's Internet Trends Report is also compulsory reading for anyone working in the digital industry.

Card-based payments are still the primary method of collecting revenue from virtual and digital content. SuperDataResearch indicates that credit cards and digital wallets account for 56% of transactions done in digital gaming.

But the importance of carrier billing has grown as well. From 2013 to 2015, carrier billing’s share in digital gaming grew by 20%, from 12% up to 14.4%. In Asia Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe, its market share even more substantial (17.1%, 21% and 20.9%, respectively). As overall transaction volumes have also gone up, this indicates a growing interest from merchants in adopting the payment method.

When considering integrating new payment solutions, an important thing for merchants to keep in mind is payment processing costs. When we talk about microtransactions, card fees are substantial: out of each $1 transaction, over 30% goes to the payment processor (~3% fee of the transaction value and the ~$0.3 transaction fee). But what other costs are related to card-based payments and how does carrier billing compare?