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3Cinteractive to provide credit card mobile transaction service

Mobile marketing and technology firm 3Cinteractive has partnered with mobile commerce enabler Billing Revolution to provide credit card transaction processing on mobile phones.

Through the partnership with Billing Revolution, 3Cinteractive can now process mobile credit-card transactions for its clients and tap deeper into a mobile commerce market expected to reach $13 billion worldwide by 2013.

?3Cinteractive specializes in creating two-way communication with mobile users, and now that these users have shown that they want to do much more than just communicate via mobile, this partnership comes at just the right time,? said Andy Kleitsch, CEO of Billing Revolution, Seattle.

?Now they can purchase goods and services and 3Cinteractive can leverage its communication platform to deliver purchase pages to targeted users, turning mobile into a revenue producing channel,? he said.

3Cinteractive provides businesses with mobile applications and strategies designed to help them acquire and retain customers, increase sales and solve business challenges.

The 3Ci service portfolio includes SMS, MMS, WAP and IVR, as well as campaign and compliance management.

Clients include ESPN, Playboy, the U.S. Army, Sporting News, Lincoln Financial Group, McCann Erickson, 4Info, ADP, ILD, Omnicom?s Zimmerman, SellingSource, the Jason Taylor Foundation, Pop2Life and JM Family Enterprises Inc.

3Ci also works with some U.S. carriers for off-deck mobile marketing.

Billing Revolution provides technology to the credit-card-processing industry that enables secure transactions from any Web-enabled mobile phone.

Mobile consumers can conduct single-click credit-card transactions, manage subscriptions and perform cancellations from their handset.

?When setting up a mobile commerce platform, it has to be very simple for a user to conduct a transaction,? Mr. Kleitsch said. ?That happens to be one of Billing Revolution's specialties.

?We make it easy for mobile customers to conduct transactions with a single-click, allowing companies like 3Cinteractive to commerce-enable their campaigns and empower users with the ability to conduct impulse transactions safely and easily from their mobile handset,? he said.

To date, 3Cinteractive has mainly focused its mobile payments offerings around premium SMS and direct billing.

As the mobile commerce space matures, there will be more instances where premium SMS and direct billing will not be feasible to facilitate transactions, according to 3Cinteractive.

?There are several substantial advantages that Billing Revolution's platform provides,? Mr. Kleitsch said. ?One of the most attractive is allowing our customers and partners to take a bigger share of revenue.

?Operators can take as much as 50 percent, where we only charge $0.50 per transaction,? he said. ?The second problem we help to overcome is that operators will not allow merchants to sell physical goods, whereas Billing Revolution enables merchants to sell anything from pizza to tires to hotel rooms.?