Billing on Mobile

During peak shopping times on August 3rd, the entire PayPal billing system failed, blocking consumers from making purchases for over 4 hours. The significant duration of the outage and the fact that the last major outage was just over a month ago prompted their SVP Technology to issue a personal apology on their blog.

While Paypal has comparatively little usage for mobile transactions, Research In Motion’s Blackberry customers will not have been able to complete a purchase during these outages. A pity they cannot offer carrier payments - in fact billing reliability seems to be a challenge for most brands app stores, based on customer feedback about the Android apps store, the Ovi content store, and the RIM store. Even the iPhone app store only allows you to pay Apple using a credit card, and not simply pay direct to your mobile phone bill.

For Bango customers it was business as usual as millions of consumers continued to successfully pay for content while PayPal rushed to solve their problem. This is because Bango Payment does not depend on any single payment method, but rather provides a unified solution that delivers a range of billing methods - from operator WAP billing, premium SMS and credit card as well as PayPal. When Bango detects a billing method outage it automatically prevents it from being presented to consumers. This ensures your customers always get the best experience and that they can pay.