By Marc Jarrett
Sometimes refered to as one of the "Club Med" group of countries and now an adopter of the Euro, Greece made headlines recently after riots errupted in several cities after police shot dead a teenager its capital, Athens. The country was currently paralysed as Greek farmers demand compensation for low commodity prices.
Greece has historically been a country highly in favour of payments in cash. However, prior to the global credit crisis, the banking system went through significant development and growth, and encouraged consumers' steady shift towards non-cash purchases and payments.
The increasing number of new products, intense competition between banks, which brought about extensive offers in the large credit cards range, the expansion of the network of accepting merchants and the recent technological developments aiming at secure transactions, all drove growth of cards.
In Greece, credit cards are almost synonymous with debit cards.
Furthermore, the use of the internet is becoming common - with 3.8m Greeks, or 35% of its 10.7m population, having access to the internet at this time. E-commerce is experiencing very promising growth, especially among young consumers. However, fraud - such as skimming and card cloning - remains concern in this market.
Greece has a developed pay-per-call market, with call tarifs ranging € 1.42 to €3.55/per Minute. OTE, the former state monopoly, is the main player in fixed-line telephony. Since the liberalization of the telecommunications market, OTE has been slowly been losing market share to other telecom operators, such as Vivodi, Q-Telecom, Tellas and Forthnet. Greece has four mobile telecom companies: Cosmote, Vodafone, TIM and Q-Telecom.
When it comes to the important part of paying you, remember to do this in the Greek language. Your phone billing provider should be able to provide you will geo-targeted script to help you to do this. If not, you should consider switching to one that does.
If you are a web marketer in the business of selling non-tangibles such as Ebooks, information, software, games, website subscriptions and so forth, then phone billing is a option worth considering, not least since the phone is so ubiquitous and effectively powers the internet.
Phone Billing for web content works as follows : The surfer sees an on-screen command inviting him or her to call a premium rate number which as the name suggests is charged at a higher rate that for most regular phone calls.
The ordering process creates revenue at the end of which the surfer is given a password which they then enter into the webpage in order to be granted access to the underlying content. Once they receive your product, the billing clock is no longer ticking.
Such billing is popular with surfers not least since they do not need to part with any personal information. To them, this is of growing importance in an era of increasing online identity theft and credit card fraud.
Since the tariffs and payouts for such pay-per-call numbers varies from country to country, so do the payouts.
As webmasters, we have all profited from globalization big time thanks to the web. With a little time and effort, we take our brands global relatively easily, and more importantly, make more money from Greece and elsewhere in the process. The world really is our oyster.
Marc has been a consultant in the pay-per-call industry since 1994 and was first-to-market with cellphone ringtones in 2000. http://www.passwordbycall.com. Money talks,in every language™
Source:www.isnare.com |
