Payclick props pester power

Beverley Head
Thursday, 24 June 2010 12:47

Your IT - Entertainment

Credit card giant Visa is pioneering its payclick prepay system for online purchases in Australia in a clear assault against micropayments market leader PayPal. At the same time the organisation is unleashing a whole new wave of teenage pester power.

Payclick allows online accounts to be established with up to $999.99 credit that can then be used to make online purchases with vendors which have signed up for the service. At present only a handful of online merchants have payclick buttons on their web sites - but among them are online heavyweights and teen icons Apple and Telstra BigPond.

Instead of teenagers begging to use the family credit card to download iTunes content every time Lady Gaga makes a move, payclick argues they will have 'autonomy' over their own payclick accounts.

Much of the marketing for the new product is targeted at teenagers and parents - encouraging the creation of 'digital pocket money' accounts which teenagers can then use to download music or videos from the internet.  Admittedly parents can also reduce the amount of money they have fed into their offspring's payclick accounts (presumably for failure to perform designated chores or breaking curfews), and also access the payclick service to see what they are buying online - but as any parent of teenagers knows, good luck with that one.

Greg Storey, general manager of payclick, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa, said that the system had been developed in Australia for Australians, and would only be available to people who could provide Australian address information. He refused to say if or when the service might be offered internationally, but denied that Australia represented just a pilot programme for the service.

Storey also declined to comment on the competitive landscape for micropayments which is currently dominated internationally by eBay's PayPal. 'We think this meets an unmet demand for small value payments,' said Storey.

Visa's media release cites research from Investment Trends which suggests that there will be $646 million of online micropayments worth less than $20) in Australia during 2010 across the online gaming, music and micro retail sectors. Clearly there is demand, but Visa's payclick is a late starter.