During peak shopping times on August 3rd, the entire PayPal billing system
The 4 1/2 hour PayPal outage

4 1/2 hour PayPal outage

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.
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1 Comment(s)

By TPM on August 10, 2009

Whilst I was not affected by the PayPal outage, I think Premium SMS billing has many challenges particularly for publishers. The main one, which I feel cause the most resitance is the time it takes to receive revenue. Most operators require at least 90 days before you receive revenues, and whilst this is logical creates a cash flow problem for businesses, as you are always at least one quarter behind in receiving the revenue.

PayPal as a payment method is only still succesful because it has reached critical mass, and users have not adopted other payment methods as readily as they have PayPal.

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