The proverbial ink has hardly dried on my blog post titled Mobile OTP: Cyanide Or Caffeine For Online Payments? than I saw the following “payment failure” screen on my laptop:
This ‘kiss-of-death’ message appeared when I tried to pay for my broadband connection. Incidentally, it was the very first online bill payment I attempted after the Mobile OTP security feature was launched.
This screen gave many likely reasons to explain why my payment failed. None of them is right.
Let me rebut each one of them via this open letter addressed to the ePayment Gateway company that displayed this screen:
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Dear ePG Company:
You: You have used the Back / Forward / Refresh button on your Browser.
Me: In general, whenever I sit in front of my computer, I get into a mad frenzy and keep clicking all buttons that I see on the screen. But, I didn’t do that on this occasion. I promise. Check your website clickstream data and you’ll know that I’m not lying.
You: Your cookies may be disabled.
Me: I don’t recall you asking for my permission to place cookies on my PC in the first place. In any case, I just successfully made another payment from the same laptop, so this can’t have anything to do with cookies.
You: Your session has been (sic) expired.
Me: Not by me, for sure.
You: You may be using same browser for different transactions.
Me: Duh! I don’t even know how to do that.
You: Your transaction has been timed out due to inactive (sic).
Me: Given my oft-expressed anxiety about failed payments, I’m extremely alert when I attempt online payments. So, if anyone was goofing off at their post, it wasn’t me.
Wish I could give you more details but I need to go to the TELCO’s office, stand in a long line and pay the bill before my broadband connection gets disconnected. So, you’ll need to excuse my brevity. In return, I’ll forget that you still owe me an explanation for failing to process my payment.
Sincerely yours,
Back-to-Cash Customer
PS: I notice that every one of your reasons begins with “you” or “your”. So much for your faith in your customers. I’ve known some narcissistic banks in my day (sorry ICICI, that old joke had to come out some day) but you’re easily the most cocksure financial institution I’ve come across. Hope some of that chutzpah rubs off on your website and keeps it up and running at all times.
PPS: If you can’t increase your website’s uptime, can you at least clean up the language on it? I hope you’re not going to blame “RBI mandate” for your shoddy grammar?
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First impression: It looks like Mobile OTP is cyanide for online payments.