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Facebook Is Experimenting with 'Credits' for Websites

Expanding the use of its payments system beyond the social network

Oct 22, 2011 16:11 GMT  ·  By
Facebook Credits will be available to websites soon
   Facebook Credits will be available to websites soon

Facebook has started experimenting with expanding Facebook Credits beyond apps and into the world wide web. It's not launching anything yet, but it is working with several websites to add support for Facebook Credits payments on places outside of Facebook.

While it's an early experiment, it's clear that Facebook has a lot of interest in expanding the use of Credits beyond its site. Considering that it's already making quite a bit of money from Credits, wanting to expand beyond that makes a lot of sense.

"We have begun working with a few developers to test the ability to offer Facebook Credits on websites, with the goal of helping them offer a more unified app experience to users beyond apps on Facebook," Facebook announced on its developers blog.

"One early example is Collapse! Blast on Gamehouse.com," it said. "At this time, we are focused on gathering early developer feedback. We will keep you posted as our tests continue."

For now, Facebook will focus on enabling developers that already use Credits on the social network to use them on their own sites, making for a less fragmented experience.

The option should appeal to smaller developers who may not have the scale or the resources to build their own payments solution. The 30 percent commission Facebook takes out of each transaction is probably a worthwhile tradeoff.

At the same time, since Credits is beginning to see some use, websites may be interested in offering their visitors and users a simple way of paying for things via a method they already trust and which makes the whole thing rather painless.

That said, large partners, like Zynga, would probably want to have to deal with Credits as little as possible, to maximize revenue.

Along with the new experiment, Facebook is expanding the methods of fueling a Credits account in several countries. Users can now pay for credits via Axeso5 (Brazil), Join Card (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand), Malaysia OBT, MEPS FPX, MEPSCASH, WebCash - all in Malaysia, PayEasy (Philippines), PaysBuy (Thailand) and SafetyPay (Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Spain, Austria, Brazil).