Move over, online payment giants. Zong is staking its claim in the mobile payments market with the launch of Zong+, an online mobile payment platform that combines carrier billing with credit, debit and prepaid cards.
Describing today's announcement as the most important launch in the company's nine-year history, Zong founder and CEO David Marcus said Zong's latest release managed to address the limitations of today's mobile payment systems, which include settlement time, price point limitations and the cost of doing the transactions.
"It's a pretty complex platform that we built," he said. "We're basically fixing something that no one ever before was fixing."
In fact, Marcus said Zong's new solution plays in the league of some other well-known online payment systems, like PayPal. The key is making the system fast – players in the middle of an online game, for example, don't want to spend a lot of time away from the game conducting a transaction.
A survey that Zong conducted earlier this year showed a significant number of people use the BillMeLater option when buying online goods simply because it's faster than the alternatives.
Specifically, Zong+ allows for larger purchase amounts – up to $19.99 – and gives incentives to customers in the form of redeemable rewards for every dollar spent through the Zong service. The new release allows Zong to address new market segments, win additional merchants and accelerate its end-user adoption rate, which benefits wireless carriers because they can get significant increases in transaction volumes, according to Zong.
Zong is connected with 107 carriers worldwide. More than 80 percent of those relationships are direct. Zong covers all U.S. carriers, but Marcus declined to name names in terms of which ones involve direct deals.
Among the merchants using Zong are Playdom, Slide, RockYou and Hi5. Sony Online is in the process of being integrated and Facebook reportedly partnered with Zong on a test program that let users buy Facebook credits by billing their mobile phone.