DaoPay, an alternate alternative to PayPal

These days when every hour we hear about new payment services launched in the virtual space it became very popular if every second provider claims that it is going to compete with PayPal online payment processor. Well, I think it is time for PayPal administration to charge a fee for using their brand in the creation of PR for new companies. Interestingly, when PayPal just started its business what company did it compare itself to? Unless it posed itself the mightiest alternative to prominent Swiss or American banks like Citigroup. Well, that doesn’t matter now, our current article is dedicated right to one of those companies who makes every effort or doesn’t make, at least who tries to introduce itself as ‘an alternative to PayPal’. The name as long as you have already read it in the title is not necessary to repeat.

The origin veiled

So what do we know about the origin of the service and its owners? Almost nothing. The company tells very little about itself on the official website. There we can only find that DaoPay has been on the market since 2001. Ha-ha-ha, seems this is the only substantial fact that we can find in the ‘About us’ section of the company site. Well, in the course of our tireless searches we revealed that the service was designed by Dao Tec Ltd. while the IP is located on the Dao Tec servers in Vienna, Austria. Thus, on the site of Dao Tec Ltd. we find this: “DaoTec Ltd. was founded in the year 2000 with the main focus of developing world class voice and SMS telephony services and connect these types of applications to the internet.” Another interesting fact is that DaoPay payment processing platform is no the only service of this company group. We found another similar phone payment service named DaoAcess. Here you can see it.

There is no popular edition talking about the service and as one author made a fair note the company seems to be not very popular inasmuch as it is not covered in any serious journal or magazine either on the web or in the printed press. This note was left in a short entry in the Wikipedia.

Anyway, what is it?

If we have such scarce information on the origin and history of the company which is not a surprise as long as the administration didn’t turn out to contact any of the magazines or popular blog authors to give the poorest interview about their activity. All the news related to the company life we can only find on their official DaoPay blog. Anyway, what is DaoPay?

Do not try to read the articles posted on their site as it will prove time waste because you won’t find any significant or worthwhile fact. All the articles resemble each other and by the way they can be found not only in the ‘collected works’ on DaoPay site, you can also run across them on a separate webpages appearing in the Google search listing. To cut a long story short, articles are a waltz about how it is important to shift to telephone payments and hence to the services of DaoPay.

Some idea of their services we found when watching the presentation with 5 steps. Thereby, we learned the following.

DaoPay offers merchants to charge their services to the phone bill of the callers, in other words it provides businesses with online billing solution. Retailers that sell games, music, pictures, memberships or any other products or services over the Internet can subscribe for DaoPay phone payment. DaoPay offers Premium Rate numbers which means that customers have the possibility to pay anonymously and fast while getting immediate access to merchants’ web contents.

Then, they tell us about the integration of their solution. “DaoPay offers different integration methods: EasyPin, EasyPass, DirectAPI Even if you have only little programming know-how, you will be able to setup DaoPay. DaoPay offers free support for its customers. If you should need support during the integration of DaoPay, our experienced specialists are glad to assist you in any way.”

In addition merchants that sign for the service are provided with the Control Center option that features:

• extensive revenue statistics
• self service integration of DaoPay onto business’ website
• choice of the countries where a client wants to use DaoPay
• choice of the desired payment methods
• setting up products and the prices a client wants to be billed
• music selection

From the company news posted on their official web blog we learned that DaoPay offers the choice of 25 currencies with the conversion capabilities. “For products, you specify the price in your account currency, and DaoPay computes the local equivalents; so EUR 5,00 becomes CAD 7,84 in Canada.” Further they say:

“While 7,84 is an exact computation based on the daily conversion rate, it’s a somewhat weird look price. That’s why we’ve introduced two additional price finding methods: Dutch and Rounded. Dutch prices are those you’re used to see at the supermarket, like 9,99 instead of 10,00. Rounded pricing, on the other hand, rounds to the next amount that ends in either 50 or 00, like 10,00 instead of 9,99. The result with both methods is that no matter what the price is, it gets converted to a local currency and it gets rounded so that it looks good.”

One more interesting fact we found on the web blog is that we at least are informed about one of the executives in the company. Of course we should have noted this fact above but actually we have just noticed it there. So, the blog posted on September 26, 2008 advises us that Andreas Pizsa joined DaoPay on September 15, 2008 as a Marketing Manager.

Andreas says: “My responsibilities at DaoPay are all things marketing, which I interpret as “anything that’s visible”, including everything that’s not yet visible, in regards to product development. My official title is “Marketing Manager”, and I translate that as “Chief Evangelist”. My contribution is a possibly unusual mix of interests and talents in the fields of marketing, software engineering and user experience design.”

Terrific! The only name having any relation to DaoPay that we know is the name of the specialist who is responsible for outer appearance and the interface of the payment processor’s site. Anyway, at least we know something.

To be continued…