T-Mobile is taking some extra steps in the direct carrier billing department by allowing customers to purchase content and services and have said services charged to their monthly bill.
“In 2009, T-Mobile was the first U.S. carrier to offer direct carrier billing for the Android Market. With this new program, we’re extending the hassle-free payment experience to browser-based purchases from virtually any online source and across a variety of mobile devices, delivering more purchasing power to mobile-centric consumers.”
While the option to have something added to your monthly bill sounds like a great idea, it would most likely just fuel needless purchases on the customers part, just because they have the option, and T-Mobile’s probably betting on just that.
The expanded direct carrier billing should go live later this month, and will give customers the option of purchasing certain content through T-Mobile at the time of purchase. The service will also be secure experience, as it will be monitored by T-Mobile and the content provider, offer extensive fraud controls, and more.
If Magenta customers take a liking to the new service, we do wonder if AT&T will want to keep it around once the merger goes through. Who knows, maybe the expansion of direct carrier billing will become so popular that other carriers may soon adopt the service themselves. Direct carrier billing certainly has a lot of potential but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t skeptical to at least some extent.
Well, T-Mobile was first to go live with carrier billing for the Android Market, and maybe we’ll eventually see other carriers follow suit. While other services are on the way, if a handset was NFC-enabled, it would be cool to be able to use your mobile phone bill act as a credit card for offline purchases as well. Talk about needless purchases.
[Via: Businesswire]