Pay-per-call, from the ping tree down.

The actors

Traffic is whoever makes the phone ring: your own media, an affiliate, a network. The ping tree is the router that asks every buyer, in parallel, "will you take this call, and for how much?" Buyers are the desks that answer. In SendAvata, your buyers are agents — licensed people with a softphone — and you are the operator who runs the marketplace between them and the traffic.

The money

1. Traffic sells a call to the ping tree.
2. The ping tree sells it to the highest acceptable bid.
3. You (the operator) bid on behalf of your agents and bridge the winner.
4. The agent pays you the line price when the call qualifies.

Your margin is the gap between what the agent pays per qualified call and what the call cost you upstream — minus whatever you pay for the software in the middle. On a flat-fee-per-call white-label, that middle toll is a fixed bite out of every call regardless of what it billed. On SendAvata you choose $/call, % of net, or a flat desk.

Qualifying time

A call that connects and drops after four seconds is not a lead. Every line sets a qualifying time — the bridged seconds a call must reach to be billable. Common marks are 20, 30, 45 and 60 seconds; longer marks mean fewer billable calls at a higher price. See how to pick one.

Seats and presence

A seat is an agent who can be routed to. The single most expensive failure in this business is bidding on a call for a seat that isn't really there. Presence has to come from the carrier — the softphone is registered or it isn't — not from a browser tab that was open twenty minutes ago.

What operators get wrong first

• Publishing a price without a qualifying time, then arguing about short calls.
• Letting agents run a negative balance "just this once."
• Moving traffic to a new router in one cut-over instead of shadowing first.
• Paying a per-call toll to the software on calls that billed $12.