Payment gateway service provider Authorize.Net is partnering with Billing Revolution to help its 250,000 merchants sell goods and services to consumers via their mobile phones.

Authorize.Net tapped mobile payments company Billing Revolution to manage the entire experience, from rendering the purchase pages and collecting credit card data to integrating with the Authorize.Net Payment Gateway and providing a CRM platform for mobile merchants. Billing Revolution?s model is based on off-deck credit-card billing via the mobile Web, enabling merchants to avoid giving the carriers a hefty cut of the take.

?Authorize.Net is one of the biggest commerce platforms in the world, and this partnership represents an enormous opportunity for the company to use our existing solution to start offering mobile payments,? said Mike Dulong, senior vice presdeint of business development at Billing Revolution, Seattle.

?From our perspective, when new clients come to us looking for mobile services, now we have a great gateway provider as a partner,? he said. ?If you look at the merchant payments processing industry, leveraging mobile payments is a new bell and whistle to differentiate from the other merchant bank provider down the street."

CyberSource Corp.?s Authorize.Net is a provider of payment gateway services, managing the submission of payment transactions to the processing networks on behalf of merchant customers.

Authorize.Net provides services to more than 250,000 Internet merchants who encompass a wide variety of business industries: information, communication, government, sports, religion, education, gourmet foods and others.

In 2006, CyberSource processed approximately 1.1 billion transactions, representing $65 billion of ecommerce.

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. 

Billing Revolution?s other clients include US Bank, Motek Mobile (see story), Skout (see story), Call2Give Network Inc. (see story) and MoVoxx (see story).

Now all of Authorize.Net merchants can use Billing Revolution to begin processing their mobile commerce transactions off-deck.

?Retailers can use their existing gateway and tap Billing Revolution to power the mobile aspect,? Mr. Dulong said. ?Carriers are openly cognizant of where they fall short when it comes to payments, and there are great opportunities for retailers to leverage mainstream payment methodologies.

?I?ve read stories where credit cards are being considered alternative payments, but they have been the primary form of payment in the U.S. market since the seventies?credit cards are as mainstream as you can possibly be,? he said. ?Operator-based billing is an alternative form of payment.

?There has been a lot of  noise and clutter in the space by start-ups, but operator billing is not sustainable in the long haul, because the revenue share does not work for retailers.?