Optimizing Mobile Payments: Mega Payout for Vostu
Category: Simulation Games
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“
We setup mobile shortcutting and new SMS price points in only four days with one engineer. It was straightforward, and we saw positive revenue impact right away.
”
— Juan Tula, Lead Developer at Vostu
Vostu, the largest social gaming company in Brazil, faced a payment challenge. With several different apps in its portfolio, its 50+ million players needed a simple, clear way to pay for their fun using mobile payments, which is a top payment method among these players. Vostu updated its payment flows using Facebook APIs to make payments with mobile phones easy for people: it optimized virtual goods pricing to match the available mobile price points and streamlined the payment flow for mobile payers. These two changes resulted in a mega payout for Vostu—the number of people paying by mobile grew fourfold, and its mobile payments revenues more than doubled.
Understand the mobile payment challenge
As most app developers have discovered, people playing Facebook games are located all over the world, using different devices, operating systems, carriers, and currency. These people are eager to spend online with their mobile phones. Analysts have forecasted that the gross transaction value of payments made via mobile phone for digital and physical goods will exceed $300 billion globally by 2013.* Mobile payers are especially important in many areas of the world where credit card penetration is low or where paying by mobile is common. In fact, mobile payments make up a significant percentage of transactions for Facebook users in in most Western/European markets along with Latin America (e.g. Chile, Brazil) and Asia (e.g. Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines).
To tap into this opportunity, developers need to understand the variables of mobile payments. First, when people pay with their mobile phones, the item is either charged directly to the person’s mobile phone bill or to the existing balance on a pre-paid phone. Second, because of the complex structure of mobile phone operators and carriers, different mobile price points are available in different regions. Since each country supports a different set of mobile price points, developers must set these on a country-by-country basis.
For Vostu, mobile monetization for their games on Facebook was initially lower than expected. Since 70% of transactions in its largest market, Brazil, came from mobile payments, optimizations were critical and could have tremendous upside. Mobile payers in Vostu’s apps faced confusing pricing and a long payment flow, which often caused them to cancel out before purchasing.
Optimize with virtual currency bundled for mobile
Like most game developers, Vostu had not optimized its virtual goods pricing to match price points of mobile payers. For example, a gamer in Brazil who wanted to purchase a currency bundle at 5 credits would likely drop out of the mobile payment flow without purchasing if the closest price point offered was 10 credits.
Then Vostu implemented the Facebook mobile price-points API. This API exposes a person’s mobile price points, so Vostu could match one or more of the mobile price points available in the person’s country to the price of goods offered in the store. This way, mobile payers had consistent pricing throughout the payment flow and were more likely to complete their purchase.
To find a user’s mobile price points, Vostu queries the mobile price points API:
https://graph.facebook.com/me?fields=payment_pricepoints
{
"payment_pricepoints": {
"mobile": [
{
"user_price": "1.0000",
"credits": 10,
"local_currency": "USD"
},
{
"user_price": "1.9900",
"credits": 20,
"local_currency": "USD"
},
...
]
},
...
Shorten the order process with mobile shortcutting
Vostu remedied its low SMS payment success rate by invoking the pay dialog with a shortcut to mobile. With mobile shortcutting, Vostu can direct mobile payers straight into the mobile payment flow vs. asking them to pick from a list of payment options. This enables a simpler payment flow with fewer steps, resulting in improved conversion.
To implement mobile shortcutting, Vostu simply invoke the pay dialog with the shortcut parameter:
function buy() {
var obj = {
method: 'pay',
action: 'buy_item',
order_info: {...} // OBJECT_ORDER_INFO,
dev_purchase_params: {'oscif': true, shortcut: 'mobile'}
};
FB.ui(obj, callback);
}
Overall, these changes were simple to launch. The addition of mobile shortcutting and new SMS price points took Vostu only four days, with one engineer fully dedicated to the task. The process was straightforward, and the company saw immediate positive impact on revenues.
By setting price points for mobile payers in each country and allowing those players to jump directly into mobile payment flow, Vostu streamlined payment flow significantly. The company’s mobile payment revenue doubled with mobile price point implementation and almost tripled with the addition of mobile shortcutting to its apps. And its total number of people paying by mobile tripled with price point improvements and increased x4 with mobile shortcutting.
Vostu stats
With price point and mobile shortcutting improvements:
- Total number of people paying by mobile grew 4x
- Mobile payment revenues increased 260%
- Mobile revenues weight on total revenues more than doubled
Related documentation
Updated about 2 months ago