Imagine that you owned a small shop, and you wished to be able to accept Visa.
But to accept Visa, imagine that you had to agree to these terms…
- Imagine that Visa insisted that you stopped accepting MasterCard and American Express.
- Imagine that Visa even insisted you stop selling for cash.
- Imagine that Visa forbid you from knowing your customer’s names, or from retaining any contact information.
- Imagine that Visa forbid you from having any direct contact with your customers whatsoever.
- Imagine that Visa handles (poorly) your customer’s product questions and support issues, and keeps them from speaking with you.
- Imagine that Visa still holds you liable for any and all customer support issues that might arise.
- Imagine that Visa insists you brand your product with www.visa.com and not your own URL.
- Imagine that Visa prevents you from even linking to your website, support forums or online FAQ’s in your documentation.
- Imagine that Visa prohibits you from doing any effective direct marketing of your store.
- Imagine that Visa provides you a listing and placement you have no control over in the Visa Catalog.
- Imagine that Visa places your competitor more prominently in the catalog than you.
- Imagine that Visa offers your competitor substantially better financial terms than you have agreed to.
And then imagine that Visa demanded a 50% to 80% transaction fee, on top of all the demands above.
No one would ever accept this sort of insanity from Visa, yet this is in essence what mobile operators demand from application developers. The mobile application “storefronts” like Handango and Motricity have done little better in enabling an ecosystem to thrive.
Imagine instead what would happen if Visa took a reasonable small percentage, enabled the transaction, and then just GOT OUT OF THE WAY.
You don’t have to imagine. Visa has enabled a global ecosystem to thrive, and they process TRILLIONS of dollars in transactions.
If only the mobile operators understood… Mobile applications will struggle to be viable until someone invents the equivalent of Visa for mobile devices. It has to be simple, affordable, fair, and the carriers MUST be willing to let go of their need for control.
Remember: it is better to have a small pipeline tapping into a raging torrent of a river than it is to have rights to 80% of the water in a desert.
Nice post. I agree – the mobile community has consistently been its own worst enemy. I think some of the excitement about the iPhone SDK annoucement is that – finally – this may change.