In France, customers can pay for goods and services using their mobile phone bills and without revealing bank details. With direct carrier billing (DCB), customers pay for certain household expenses on their monthly phone bills. This system has become increasingly popular in France and is used to pay for inexpensive purchases, such as games, subscriptions, public transport tickets, digital services, and more.

In this article, we explain DCB, including how it works, its advantages, and how businesses can benefit from offering it.

What’s in this article?

• What is direct carrier billing?
  
• How direct carrier billing works
  
• What can customers pay with direct carrier billing?
  
• Direct carrier billing purchase caps
  
• Advantages of direct carrier billing
  
• Disadvantages of direct carrier billing
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

What is direct carrier billing?

Customers can use direct carrier billing (DCB) to pay for certain purchases via their phone bills. DCB allows customers to avoid entering bank details or debit and credit card information when making online or in-app purchases. To pay with DCB, customers select that option from the available payment methods, and purchase amounts are added directly to their phone bills.

DCB is practical for everyday microtransactions, such as purchases of digital content services, public transportation tickets, and movie tickets. This payment method is an accessible alternative to paying by card, digital wallet, or bank transfer. For French customers, DCB provides speed, ease, and security.

How direct carrier billing works

To use DCB, a customer chooses to pay for a purchase using their phone bill. Then, their phone provider—such as Orange, Sosh, SFR, RED, Bouygues Telecom, or others—redirects them to a secure page to validate the payment. The provider bills the transaction and manages invoicing.

Next, the purchase amount is added to the customer’s monthly mobile bill or deducted from prepaid credit. This allows the customer to group their expenditures together into one monthly bill. To confirm payment, the customer receives a text message or email after each transaction.

It is important to note that the customer must activate DCB in their phone’s settings—iOS or Android—before making purchases. Service activation is typically a one-time setup.

What can customers pay with direct carrier billing?

DCB is best suited for small purchases. These include subscriptions, video games, movies, newspapers, magazines, premium content, ebooks, audio content, music, cloud services, creative tools, and online storage.

Some providers accept DCB for public transportation, such as tickets for subways, buses, trams, or parking. Other providers allow customers to use DCB to make donations or buy event tickets online (e.g., concerts, museum admission, conferences, or other events).

Many application platforms—such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store—and entertainment platforms—such as PlayStation, Xbox, Netflix, and Spotify—also allow customers to pay using DCB.

Direct carrier billing purchase caps

There are caps on purchases made using DCB that are often set by phone providers. For example, Bouygues Telecom caps purchases at €50 per transaction and €300 per month for each phone line on an account. Orange applies the same purchase caps.

Advantages of direct carrier billing

DCB offers several upsides for businesses and customers. By collaborating with phone service providers, businesses can do the following:

• Benefit from an additional sales channel
  
• Increase their conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment because DCB is faster and more intuitive than traditional payment methods
  
• Acquire new customers and expand their bases
  
• Reach populations without bank accounts and meet the needs of customers who prefer to limit inputting bank details
  
• Simplify the customer experience and shopping process to increase confidence and improve customer retention
  
• Improve brand image by offering an efficient and modern payment method
  
• Delegate billing to phone service providers, allowing businesses to focus on other operations
  

Customers benefit from the simplicity, ease of use, and security that DCB provides. They can make purchases anywhere—from a mobile device or at a point of sale—using a free service. They can also avoid providing sensitive bank information and benefit from a unified billing experience that helps them monitor their expenses more closely.

The integration of DCB is also a major advantage for businesses and allows them to modernize the purchasing experience and make it more efficient.

Disadvantages of direct carrier billing

DCB also has some disadvantages. Phone service providers often charge a commission for the service, which can reduce a business’s profit margins. Providers also impose transaction limits that can restrict a business’s revenue and flexibility. Therefore, DCB is a viable solution for microtransactions in specific sectors (e.g., the digital sector), but it is not well suited for larger transactions.

Lastly, DCB includes continued dependency on phone service providers. If phone service goes down or there is a power outage, transactions can fail. For these reasons, some businesses are still reluctant to adopt this payment method.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe
  
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• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.
  
• Improve payments performance: : Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.
  
• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.
  

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.