Henri Cook

I’ve spent the last week, on and off, trying to add a card to my Google Checkout account on my HTC Hero. I got a collection of weird errors that I couldn’t explain, I was on a train at the time so thought it might be something to do with me hopping between access points. I’ve only now realised the problem upon visiting the Google Checkout website on a normal PC.

Google Checkout no longer supports Maestro, I had read an article about this but it had slipped my mind. The Google Checkout page (App?) on my Android phone’s Market still lists Maestro as a viable option. I can only think that the phone’s trying to send the Maestro details, getting a weird rejection code which it deals with in a correspondingly weird way.

So if you’re having problems adding a card to your Google checkout account – switch to Visa.

On the same note, why Google decided to ban Maestro is beyond me, it’s certainly the card of choice in the UK – everyone seems to have one – I resent having to use my credit card to make all these purchases, usually because I forget to pay it off and suffer in the subsequent round of interest!

I hear Maestro imposes very large fees and this is a big knock back from Google, but the support for Maestro in high street stores presumably isn’t going anywhere so what’s going to happen in this old-school mexican stand off? I suspect Google Checkout, and its customers are going to end up losing out.