Idea Cellular offers direct billing for Google Play Store
1 min read 05 May 2016, 02:32 PM ISTIdea Cellular subscribers can now use their telecom account to make purchases on Google Play Store
Premium
New Delhi: If you use Idea Cellular, now you can use your telecom account to make purchases on Google Play Store.
Idea Cellular with Google India on Thursday introduced a joint initiative of direct carrier billing for the 184 million Idea subscribers.
The launch of direct carrier billing, even though only for Idea customers, provides an option to purchase digital content on Google Play Store with a telecom account. This billing does away with the need to have a credit/debit card or netbanking facility to purchase a game or movie or e-book on Google Play Store.
In other words, customers can buy any app or pay for an in-app feature on Google Play Store and they will be charged from their respective postpaid or prepaid mobile accounts.
Idea is the third-largest operator and has 18.9% revenue market share (RMS). As stated, 25% of the Idea subscribers use data with an average consumption of data being 0.6 GB. “The kind of data adoption we are witnessing, we expect three times more subscribers," said P. Lakshminarayana, chief operating officer (corporate), Idea Cellular.
The benefits for the customer include two-click purchase with a fully secure payment option, as claimed by Idea and Google. The app would cost the customer the product price and also a convenient fees will be levied on the same. In case of reversal of payment, the convenient fees will also be returned to the customer with the product cost.
Customers will have to use cellular data option and not WiFi to establish a connection between Google and Idea for the billing service. For any further transactions, either WiFi or cellular data may be used.
“Last year, 50 billion Google apps were downloaded in India itself. One significant problem in spite of such growth is that the credit card penetration is less than 3%. Direct Carrier billing is a step towards evolution to make it easier for customers to make purchases," said Mike Hayes, business development, Android & Chrome Partnerships, Google.
In 2014, Idea also entered into a similar arrangement with Microsoft. Idea has easy payment options with Eros, Hungama and Opera as well.
