Getting Started

SMS Billing lets your customers pay by adding the charge to their mobile phone bill, through Itelebill. The customer enters their mobile number, confirms by text, and the amount goes on their bill. Both one-off payments and subscriptions are supported.

SMS Billing is switched on for your account by our team. Contact [email protected] to have it enabled. Until it is, the SMS endpoints return a 403.

Set up

Once SMS Billing is enabled, choose SMS Billing from the menu followed by Products.
Create a product. Its name appears in the texts your customer receives and on their bill, so keep it short and recognisable (20 characters at most).
- One-off: you send the amount with each payment request.
- Subscription: set the price, the renewal period in days and, optionally, a different renewal price. Each product's ID is shown on the products page; you send it as sms_product_id.
Create an SMS Billing Payment Profile (Payment Profiles → Create New Profile, type SMS Billing), Sandbox to test or Live. Use its application key and secret (API Settings on the profile), and add a Callback URL there to receive postbacks. The SMS Billing API only takes an SMS Billing profile, and that profile can't be used for other payment types (403).
Create a payment request and send your customer to the redirect_url it returns.

How the customer pays

On a phone

The customer enters their mobile number on the payment page.
We text them a free message with the price and ask them to reply PAY AGREE. They have 10 minutes.
Once they reply, we charge their phone bill and the page shows the result. They receive a receipt by text.
The customer is taken back to your redirect_url (or failed_url if it didn't go through).

On a computer

The payment page shows a short code word for the customer to text to our short code 79279, for example PAY PIANO. We reply asking them to confirm with PAY AGREE, and the payment carries on as above.

Limits


Amount	1p to £40.00 per payment. Subscriptions charge between 1p and £40.00 per renewal.
Daily limit	A mobile number can be charged up to £150.00 in 24 hours across all merchants.
Networks	O2, EE, Three and Vodafone are billed directly to the phone bill. Sky Mobile customers are billed by premium text messages, so on Sky the amount must be a multiple of 50p.
Subscriptions	A mobile number can only hold one live subscription to each product.

Customer texts

Every message we send is free to the customer and includes the Itelebill help line. The customer can reply STOP at any time to cancel their subscriptions, or PAY HELP for help.

When	Text
Before the charge	Price, product and how to confirm with PAY AGREE.
After the charge	A receipt with the amount and, for subscriptions, how often it renews.
After each renewal	A receipt with the amount, when the next renewal is due, and how to stop it.
Every £20.00 spent on a product in 30 days	A spend reminder.

Payouts and statements

On the 1st of each month we produce a statement for the month before under SMS Billing → Statements. It shows what your customers spent, the VAT and network fees, and what we pay you. Please send each statement as an invoice, adding VAT where appropriate, to [email protected].