LINE

Welcome to a review about Line. Now you’re thinking to yourself: “What the fuck is Line?” Patience, all will be answered shortly. There are two sides to Line which are extremely different. One is the consumer side, and one is the business side. We will go over both of them, but we will primarily focus on the latter side. Before we get into all that however, you need to know who you’re basically going to be targeting and who the fuck uses Line in the first place. Your main markets with this business solution are countries in South East Asia, such as Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Let’s check out both sides of the coin, shall we?

Plenty of user features like messaging, video calls, and shop

Before I can tell you about Line Merchant and how you can use it as a business solution in Taiwan, Thailand, as well as in Japan, I need to tell you about how users use this app. You see, Line is more of an ecosystem of different apps and functions than it is just a messaging app. Sure, the main feature is instant messaging, and there are also video calls and shit like that, but none of that is the sole reason for Line’s existence. You see, this app also allows users to buy stickers, themes, games, and it also allows them to create a virtual wallet that they can literally pay with at places that accept Line payments.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, yes, but we also need to keep in mind that this is only for the market that I mentioned. Most of the users of Line.me are from southeast Asia and from those countries that I previously mentioned in particular. In Thailand, the Payment option for Line also has a different brand because it has the word rabbit before the main name of the entire system. So yeah, it’s a pretty standard instant messaging app with video call features, and some other payment and shop features added to the mix! Now that you know that, we can move on to the business side of things too! Trust me; you’re going to need all this if you intend on starting some kind of porn business in these countries.

Merchant marketing is quite advanced with this tool

The first thing I want to talk about is how you can use the Line Merchant to boost your sales and shit. How do you increase your sales with Line, you’re asking? Oh, I don’t know; I thought that adding another option for payment is always a good thing! And it is! With Line, you can open up a whole segment of the market of people who really like to use this app to pay for shit. And why do they like to pay with it? Well, since Line.me comes with all kinds of perks that they can use, such as accumulating points and other things that will help them get discounts, gifts, promotions and so on. It’s a pretty sweet deal IMHO.

With things like users adding merchants as friends, Line offers an amazing Merchant marketing support. This is great since I can imagine many merchants who use Line will eventually want to use all the data that they have collected for new promotions, ads and shit like that. Anyway, I think that before we get into marketing the thing and all that, we should first figure out how the entire damn thing works. But after you are done with that, you can solely concentrate on this method of payment and getting as many people from these Southeast Asian countries to use Line and experience its greatness as well.

The API can be a bit of a hassle to integrate unfortunately

So how do you integrate Line? Well, you need to follow the Online API Guide, and they also have an Offline API Guide, which means you can download it to your computer. It’s not like you can access it without internet; that would just be such a dumb thing to presuppose. But yeah, if you were stupid enough to suppose that the Offline API Guide would be available to you without internet, then you’re probably too stupid to read the API Guide either way. You need to have a basic understanding of programming as well as UML (unified modeling language) to understand the use cases and all the activity diagrams as well. These are all integral to understanding how the system works and all that.

With Line, you can expect that the API will be difficult to integrate unless you have someone who is an expert in the field who can help you. It does take a bit of work and it can’t happen overnight, but if you put your time and energy into it, you can get a great payment method really quickly. Okay, maybe not really fast, but fairly quickly. You also need to pay attention to how you use their logo and stuff like that. You can easily download the resources for their logo from their website and there, you’ll find instructions on how you can and cannot use the logo. The rules can be pretty strict at times; take care.

Plenty of online and real-life payment options for users

And after all that, we come to probably one of the most important things when it comes to Line and that is how the user can pay. Of course, one of the main ways is that they can pay online, directly on your website as just another payment method where they log in with their username and password. In this way, Line mimics the likes of PayPal and similar payment services that allow you to get online transfers of funds from your users. All of this is great if you ask me, and I wish that we could have as many of these payment options around the world as possible. But yeah, limited market for this one.

As for other methods that you can use, if you are ever in a situation where you need to get payments from users in a physical store (which I don’t know how it can be applicable to a porn site, but perhaps for a sex store?), you can use QR Codes; LINE Pay mountable terminals, as well as APP POS. The first one is just a regular QR code that the user scans with their Line app and finish the transaction. The second one is a more interactive terminal that looks and works more like a regular POS contactless terminal but also uses QR codes. In the APP POS, the roles are just reversed, and the merchant scans the user’s QR, but the user still pays here. The online payment is probably the most important to you.

Kinda hard to find the business solution page of Line

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that you have to be pretty flexible and the site doesn’t really hold your hand through any of this shit. You have to figure most of it out yourself. Even getting to the site's business side is a bit difficult since it’s actually hidden under a few submenus and pages after you come to Line.me. My biggest gripe with their entire payment system is that they are still using these fucking QR codes. I mean, couldn’t they think of a way to implement NFC support in their terminal devices? These look exactly like POS devices that allow for contactless payments with NFC and so on.

But hey, I won’t bag on them too much for that. I still like the fact that you are able to market yourself and your porn services to this part of the world. There is a lot of money to be made here, so I can see why you would want to keep your eye on the prize here. Not to mention that there is an entire site of Line.me in English so that you can enjoy reading through all this stuff with ease, minus the eventual spelling and grammar mistakes that you will definitely encounter while you are using this site. But all in all, I have to say that Line is a pretty pleasant experience and it can provide you with a great service!