Posts Tagged ‘global business’
Online Payment Systems: The Missed Opportunity
For the past few years online advertising has been the de-facto monetization mechanism for online businesses that do not sell physical goods. As a result very few companies have actually focused on receiving payments directly from consumers. This lack of attention really shows when you try to figure out a holistic approach to online payments for your business. The short news: global online payment systems are a mess especially if you are not a 10 year old S&P 500 company!
As this economic downturn puts pressure on more and more web startups to skip the dwindling online advertising revenue stream and go directly to the consumers more entrepreneurs will get exposed to this mess. Since I have been dealing with this problem for almost a year now, I thought I should just summarize what is wrong with this ecosystem. Hopefully this post provides some guidance to fellow web entrepreneurs that are/will go through the same and save them some time.
I am also going to propose some basic requirements for anybody who wants to solve this problem. My hope is that somebody in the payment business will take a look at this list and hopefully provide a product that satisfies these requirements. I really believe that there is a huge opportunity here and whoever cracks this problem properly will benefit immensely. If I was not busy building Zoosk, this would be on the top of my list of opportunities to tackle.
