Our projects: SMS payments "for the lazy"

    Over the 5 years of the existence of the smscoin project, not only the team has grown, but also the field of activity of our company. SMS billing has remained the main focus of our project; but we went further by changing development methods, having tried a lot of the latest technologies in active business applications, developing in other equally interesting areas. It is about these projects and the interesting experience gained in the process of their development that will be discussed in a series of articles, the first of which is before you.

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    In order to justify the presence of Django in the list of tags, I note that this is our first public project on Django, even though the framework itself was used earlier in internal development.

    If you are interested in how you can connect SMS payments to your resource without writing a single line of code, without registering on our website, and getting all the money in advance, then please read on.

    The story about this project is worth starting with a certain background. At one time, we offered the service SMS: safe, the task of which was to generate instructions for paying SMS for amounts that exceed the maximum available tariff in a specific country (if anyone does not know, the maximum payment amount is extremely limited and differs in each country). So, if a partner wanted to get $ 5, then in the service settings he had the opportunity to choose the option of payment with the sending of several SMS in the drop-down menu, the total cost of which is closest to the desired total amount. For example, you could choose 3 sms for $ 2 or 5 sms for $ 0.9. An important condition was that the cost of all SMS while paying remained the same. In fact, the tariff was simply multiplied by the number of SMS to be sent.

    The service was not popular for a number of reasons. This is the difficulty in understanding the operation scheme, and the non-trivial integration scheme, and the limitations of the scheme in fitting to the cost (it was impossible to make 2 sms for $ 2 and 1 sms for $ 0.9, to get the amount from the example above), or too many sms and more accurate amount or few SMS, but the amount is far from the desired. As a result, we came to the decision to freeze the service and not offer it to partners.

    Be that as it may, demand remained, and although some of the partners could implement this logic on their side (thank God, we have export of all tariffs), many for one reason or another expected that we would provide them with such a solution. As you know, demand creates supply, and a year ago we came up with and quickly implemented a new version of the service as a separate project.

    This time we decided to go further and realize the “wet dream” of any seller: do nothing and get money for the goods in advance. To do this, we needed 2 simple things - the product and its value. For the goods, it was decided to take the vouchers provided by the seller for the service, or to replenish the balance. It can be either PIN codes, login password, or even activation links. This mechanism is widely used on file sharing services or on social networks. Apple has iTunes vouchers in iTunes, and previously Skype had it. In other words, vouchers are a fairly popular way of cash flow that works on many popular services.

    In general, we have decided on the product and its price (which is determined by the seller). It remained to refine the technical part. For development, they chose Django, which was previously used. It is worth noting that for the developer of this project it was the first and, in general, successful experience (the project works and brings money). From a technical point of view, it was decided to use all the power of automation that SmsCoin provides, and instructions automatically generated by a function that considers the selected country and amount as parameters and provides an array of data from which the instruction for the user is built. Unlike the original SMS service: safe, different tariffs can be combined, but the main goal is to reduce the number of SMS messages sent.

    To distinguish one payment from another, a unique message text is generated for the user, and all SMS with this text are attached to his payment. To avoid the cases of fraud, so common in the field of SMS payments, all SMS should be sent from the same country and, in principle, from the same number. In order for users to clearly know how much they have already paid and how much is left, when receiving SMS the status in the instructions changes from “expected” to “received”. And in general, the entire instruction is simple and understandable. They decided not to limit the time of the transaction, since a situation may arise in which the subscriber does not have enough funds to send all SMS messages at once, and he needs to replenish the balance. So that users can return to an open transaction or re-view the previously received code,

    The result was a very interesting project with the simple name smspay4.com . For end users, the interface is absolutely minimalistic: payment instructions, feedback form and transaction viewing form. There is simply nowhere to get lost, there is only one way - to successful payment.

    For sellers, the project came out even more interesting. We don’t need to register anywhere (in principle, there is nowhere) - we are just registering on the seller’s website (well, or we are communicating by mail). The whole integration process is to add a link to the payment page, created specifically for the seller’s project. Financial settlements also mainly work on a prepaid basis, i.e. we pay and buy vouchers first, and when they are sold, it is our concern, and the seller has already received his money.

    As a result, in principle, trivial logic and understandable implementation formed the basis of the project with a rather interesting sales scheme, perfectly suitable for a mass of services and requiring absolutely no action from them. To understand everything that was written earlier, I’ll provide a link to the payment page of one of the projects with which we work according to this scheme - smspay4.com/project/hotfile

    The project came out simple (at least its part visible to the user), but fully meeting the specified requirements . As far as we know, none of the competitors have such a solution, which is also nice :-). All who are interested in cooperation, write to the PM or contact the contacts on the site.

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