A lot of individuals today wish they could start their own businesses. Selling prepaid phone cards would make a nice start to a viable business proposition. Getting into this business should be quite easy and could convert your dreams into reality. However, there is a very wide gap between truth and fiction. Your goals, whatever the may be, can only be achieved with meticulous planning.

As a home-based, online or standard entrepreneur, you will need to have a plan to avoid pitfalls, to achieve your goals, and to establish a profitable business venture. As a phone card seller, you need to create a viable business plan to avoid stumbling blocks, achieve your goals, and build a profitable home business, such as selling prepaid phone cards.

Find Out What Services Your Distributor Would Offer

Before you start selling, it's important to inquire from your service provider if they provide customizable business management, or web-based platforms to the wholesale agents, where you could:

- Set your own rates for their customers.

- Create different rate plans with different billing increments (rounding to seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute etc.), impose connection and disconnection charges, monthly fees and other parameters. Check if billing can be done in a local currency.

- Credit and charge amounts to/from accounts

- Configure postpaid or prepaid billing types for the customers

- View the billing and errors for each account

- Configure speed dial numbers or services for the customers

- Generate pin codes for calling cards

The Mechanism Of Prepaid Phone Cards

Prospective retailers should have a wider grasp of the business they are going into. They should know that prepaid phone cards come in different dollar denominations, or face values, which are often between $5, $10 or $25 per card. They may also be packaged in minutes, such as 30, 60, or 90 minutes per card.

The cards available often charge different per-minute rates. Before you sell cards, ask your distributor the details about how many minutes of calling time in the cards. With some cards, when you buy more minutes, you get a better per-minute price. Instead of minutes, some operators indicate how many "units" are on the card.

A unit equals one minute calling time for calls placed within the continental United States. On calls from territories like Puerto Rico and Guam and to other countries, you may be charged more than one unit for every minute you are on the phone. Knowing these details helps in properly informing the buying public about the characteristics of prepaid call cards.

Phone Cards Use VoIP Technology

The main reason why phone cards are able offer very affordable rates to call local or overseas is because of the unique technology used. Service providers selling phone cards use a combination of VoIP (Voice over IP) and regular lines to get a fairly good balance between call quality and low prices. In addition, since the cards are pre-paid, which means you pay in advance for the specified talk time, other charges are reduced, like the ones for collection charges or debt retrieval.

Regardless of the impact of brisk competition, regulation, and ever-changing technologies, the prepaid call card industry still continues to enjoy brisk sales and a sees a brighter future. The major prepaid distributors are producing better, and more efficient cards that are getting more attractive with extra add-on services. The marketing strategies of prepaid firms are gaining more sophistication, and flashy advertising is being employed to attract the consumer's attention. Even in a fledgling industry with less than two decades under its belt, brand name awareness and reputation plays an important role.

According to an industry-related strategy and customized research consultancy firm, the growth of the prepaid industry from 2002 to 2008 will be quite less than 10 percent in compounded annual growth rates (CAGR). An industry analyst quotes that the traditional international calling card market will attain the most growth, getting revenues from international calls.

Since ethnic groups in the US continue to grow, the prospects for compact and medium-sized prepaid companies are good. Specializing in a single ethnic market can be rewarding, as proven by some small start-ups, focusing mostly on the Asian market, with a keen eye on China, the most populous nation on earth.

However, as the prepaid phone cards industry continues to grow, it is inevitable that more distribution and marketing methods would evolve to adapt to new market layers and future technologies. As these strategies begin to take hold, the industry will become more diverse and wider, by offering new strategies, marketing methods and even greater opportunities.

For the past five years, pre-paid phone cards have gone from a niche business to a really large one, generating $3 billion in annual sales, with the cost of making a call with one of these cards plummeting largely. The future would definitely look bright for the international prepaid business, according to prepaid industry insiders and analysts.

If you have taken a close look at your recent overseas phone bills, you probably may have noticed the rates going up. However, you use a pre-paid phone card, you would be spending as little as 3 cents a minute for long-distance calls and not more than that when you call overseas. There is good evidence that the global prepaid calling cards of the past have evolved into the future. These newer, more cost-efficient cards have greatly lower rates than mobile phones and standard phone lines.

Globalization has also increased the need for international prepaid phone cards, and so thus would the potential be for businesses that engage in this market. Now, more people need to call overseas to conduct their business, social or family affairs. Thru prepaid phone calling cards, folks overseas can do so easily without spending too much.

However cheap the current rates, callers need not have to sacrifice quality for quantity, and there are no requirements for a long- term commitment when using these cards. And best of all, these new arrays of international prepaid phone cards come with many handy features such as pin-less dialing, make using global prepaid calling cards even more convenient, and also make prospective businessmen beam with glee, for the cheaper the cards, the bigger would their expected profits be.

Prepaid calling cards have been a growing business for the past decade. By judging from its very early beginnings, the services offered by call cards was marred with lots of technical glitches and delays, however the industry has improved today and the quality of services has widened.

At present, consumers can find a lot of prepaid call card suppliers that offer relatively similar rates. As the technology progresses in the coming years, it is expected that this will play a major role in the global telecommunications business

Why Call Cards Offer Lower Rates.

The main reason why call cards offer distinctively low rates for international or domestic calls is because of the different technology used. Most call card providers sell cards using a combination of VoIP (Voice over IP) and regular lines, to achieve a good balance between call quality and low prices. In Addition, since the call cards are pre-paid, which means you pay in advance for the amount you think you'll use, some other costs are cut, like the ones for collections or debt retrieval.

Some Terms You Need To Know When Using Prepaid Call Cards

As mentioned earlier, the mode and quality of service varies with each call card operator. Some providers may charge different sorts of fees, depending on whenever you easily spot them. Some fees may be shown upfront, while others could be hidden.

On of these charges is the Maintenance Fee. This fee is an amount deducted from the calling card's daily, weekly or monthly balance, with the effect of reducing your minutes. Another fee is the Connection Fee, which is an amount deducted from the calling card's balance once a call is connected. The other fee is called Rounding. This refers to the multiple of minutes you'll be charged when making a call.

An example would be: 4 minutes rounding means that you'll be charged in 4 minutes increments, like from 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 and so on. A call for 9 minutes and 30 seconds will be charged 12 minutes. It is important for consumers to verify the charging and connection mechanisms of each call card provider, to enable them to choose the ones that offer the most affordable rates.

Callers Should Get A Card That Suits Their Needs

To make sure that a user gets the most suitable phone cards, make a comparison of different providers to ensure that you get the one that fits your calling needs.

A card doesn't need to have to have the lowest rate, or the highest, to be the best. If you generally make long calls or if you make calls very often, you can get a card with a maintenance fee or even one with a connection fee, as these call card types offer the lowest rates.

Even if you have a maintenance fee, and given that you'd make a lot of long calls and eat up the balance quickly, the maintenance fee will be only deducted once or maybe twice, but you get a huge amount of minutes to talk. If a user makes short or seldom calls, a calling card with 1 second rounding and no maintenance fee would be the most suitable choice.

Users then won't have to worry about their balance being deducted if they don't use the card. The notion is to use it whenever you need it, and the money would still be there even in 1 year or more.