Prepaid Recharge and Top up Online.

In recent months there have been a few web sites that have popped up on the internet which enable consumers to recharge their prepaid cell phone accounts online.

There are benefits of course to this type of recharge mechanism.

Firstly, from a consumer stand point recharging your airtime minutes will be easier than ever before. Simply log onto the internet, select the prepaid airtime minutes you require, and check out. Recharge pins are sent directly to your email address which you registered and in some cases the recharge pin can be sent directly to your phone. For the owners of these online prepaid airtime recharge web sites – the biggest risk is online credit card fraud. Online credit card fraud is still the single biggest risk factor to doing business online. The reason for this is twofold. There are organized groups who steal credit card details and surf the internet purchasing goods. No signatures are required and the anonymity plays well into these criminals modus of operandi.

Additionally, chargeback’s are another issue – when a customer’s purchases a product on the internet – no signature is required and that customer can charge the transaction back – throwing up their hands and claiming that they never made the purchase and that their credit card number has been used illegally.

Both are risks, but naturally organised credit card theft as described in the former example is a much bigger risk factor. The upside however is exciting. Internet penetration is growing rapidly and many people spend hours of their time online. Perhaps the networks will eventually do well to partner with online recharge companies. In many instances the networks themselves are offering online recharge. The benefits to working with online recharge aggregators are that the network carriers can benefit from economies of scale. The aggregator will be spending the money to drive traffic to their website and not the network carriers.

Online recharge is a new model which is interesting for the obvious reasons. Time will tell how things will unfold

Contact Information

Stephen O’Sullivan

Operations Manager

Prepaid Earth

Contact via E-mail