Google doesn't want my money

ON FRIDAY morning, we decided to order Google's extra storage space, that is, an extra six gigabytes for $20 greenbacks per year. We're still waiting for the credit card to be charged.

We don't know if Google got swamped with orders, if they have a dozen elves in a cave in the North Pole manually doing credit card validation, or if this is just the way things are supposed to be. What this humble scribbler knows is that Google's order page reads "Fast Checkout through Google" and "Please allow up to 24 hours for your new storage amount to appear in all services". Fast checkout, we can confirm that. Fast processing... not by other online services' standards.

An "electronic receipt" arrived on my GMail Inbox minutes after I placed the order. Two days later and my credit card remained undebited. Contrast this with other mundane electronic purchases like registering a domain name which are handled immediately after real-time online processing of the credit card transaction, or Amazon.com which usually charges a credit card for "electronic delivery" items like gift certificates and the like within a handful of hours after entering the order.

So GMail keeps telling me that "my account is almost full", and that I should "purchase additional storage space". Hrmm. A reader wrote me a miffed e-mail saying "With your hosting company, you have an existing billing account with an "established Line of Credit" on how they currently bill you. Google has to create a billing account for you and verify the charge, etc." That made very little sense to me, as when I created my hosting account at my current provider, they had none of my data and in less than six hours I had my account billed and operating.

Clearly, Google has some work to do on the "Google Checkout" process to make it as fast as what other online billing systems are providing. I thereby revise my review of the Google Storage service, chopping off one beer from the score. µ

Bartender's Report

L'INQ
Purchase Google Storage

See also:
Google's paid storage gives oxygen to e-mail hoarders