Prepaid Cell Phone Plans
From LoveToKnow Business
Prepaid cell phone plans are ideal for small business owners looking to save on occasional cell phone use, avoid contracts and overage fees, by purchasing minutes or units on a pay as you go basis. As the minutes are used and subtracted from your account, you can easily buy more at local prepaid vendors, by phone or online using a credit or debit card. No credit checks are required, so business owners with less than stellar credit histories can benefit.
How Prepaid Plans Work
The beauty of prepaid is simplicity. You buy a phone, open an account, pay for your minutes either in a lump sum of 30-1,000 minutes, or buy a calling card in a specified amount and away you go. When you near the end of your allotted minutes, you purchase more. Some carriers offer the convenience of monthly debits from your credit or debit card to automatically add more minutes on a specified date.
Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) like Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, TracFone, and Liberty Wireless are companies that buy huge volumes of minutes from wireless carriers, and then resell the minutes as part of their own branded service plans. The end user gains the advantage of far cheaper rates because of their volume purchases.
Prepaid Plan Costs
All prepaid carriers offer plans with numerous options, charging 10 to 60 cents a minute. No one carrier is clearly better than another. Choosing a plan requires reading the fine print of the offer matched to your needs. The more minutes you purchase, the less expensive your prime time rate will be. For example, buy 150 minutes and expect to pay about 30 cents a minute. Buy a 1,000 minutes will reduce your rate to 10 center per minute. Night and weekend calls are also cheaper, as are calls to another phone using the same carrier. To these basic costs could be added daily access fees depending upon the carrier you use, sometimes charged whether you use your cell phone or not. Auto pay options may not charge daily access fees, but you’ll be charged for additional minutes used over your basic plan, at 45 cents or more per minute.
Check your carrier to insure that your purchased minutes don’t expire at the end of the month but rollover into the next. Not all carriers offer rollovers. Roaming, long-distance charges for international calls, text, multimedia messages and ring tones can incur extra fees.
Advantages Of Prepaid Cell Phone Plans
Prepaid cell phone plans are very easy to use. Since there are no contracts binding you to one carrier, or any hefty plan cancellation penalties, when you reach the end of your allotted minutes, you’re free to change carriers. You can add additional minutes to your monthly allotment, which can decrease your per unit rate. There’s no credit checks required, a distinct advantage to business owners who have run into some credit challenges. TracPhone and Virgin Mobile don’t require a credit card for purchase of additional minutes. All you do is find a retailer who sells the prepaid minute cards and pay for these in cash.
Disadvantages Of Prepaid Plans
There are some disadvantages. The first is that rates are generally higher than contracted service plans and you‘ll pay more for prepaid plans long term. Another is that minutes are only good for limited times, usually 30-90 days and plans don’t contain a rollover clause, so unused minutes can expire. If you’re looking for the latest technology, you won’t find it with prepaid plans. Carrier cell phone technology offered are older units lacking the whistles and bells heavily advertised by contracted carrier plans, including text messaging, picture transmission or customizable ring tones. Porting your phone number to a prepaid phone isn’t possible. And cell phones don’t work with all plans. So while you’re free to change carriers, you may have to buy another phone if you do.
The Future
As major wire carriers enter the arena, expect to see more features added to basic services. But with these added features will come increased costs. But lacking contract commitments, prepaid cell phone plans will remain the best deal for business owners.
Where To Buy Prepaid Plans
Comments
Hi Annsavell,
There are plenty of opportunities out there. Here are a few to get you started:
- Bank of America –Merchant Card Processing offers this revenue-generating channel without setup costs.
IDT – Offers more than one opportunity to sell prepaid phone cards. You can become an agent for the world’s largest prepaid phone card business—IDT. They offer competitive compensation, comprehensive training and effective sales materials.
- Long Distance Post LLC – Offers the opportunity to become an affiliate and sell their Prepaid Calling cards, without ever buying any single card.
- Speedy Pin Phone – Lets you promote and Sell promotional phone cards.
how to become a vendor for selling prepaid mobile phone in my shop please help me
-- Contributed by: annsavell le grandThis page has been accessed 828 times. This page was last modified 18:57, 24 October 2006.
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