I have been a Yahoo! Bill Pay customer for years. Yahoo Bill Pay is basically a service provided by a separate customer, CheckFree, under the Yahoo! Bill Pay name.

I wrote about the combination and the ‘new online bill payment technology’ about a decade ago and signed up to try the service at the same time. For years I have been a very happy customer, only experiencing major difficulties every 2-3 years (like when a transaction just completely disappears either due to user error or who knows what?).

All Good Things Must Come to an End

This combination proves that all good things must come to an end. Over the last two to three years the service has been getting worse month by month. Reliability is about the same as far as payments actually making it there once you have them uploaded into the system goes.

When I say the service is getting worse I mean that it’s getting more difficult to process a transaction online. Since that’s the entire purpose of online bill payment you would think that the two companies would focus on keeping that working well. Unfortunately that concept can be further from the truth.

As far as I can tell both companies have completely abandoned the product. Every time that I intend to make a transaction, simply entering the amount the date and hitting him to pay this button is, as soon as the server start to process the transaction with a timeout, or the error out, or I get a stupid message that states that they are sorry they cannot process the transaction due to technical difficulties. It’s the Yahoo equivalent of the blue screen of death.

Today for example,I had to pay three simple bills. I had to pay one small credit card bill, a student loan,and my gas bill.

I received the problem processing payment screen he no less than 20 timesas I attempted to submit paymentsfor these three bills. I have learned over the last two or three yearsat this screen is basically bogus. He their servers are not down, they’re not really having technical difficulties, it’s just not working.

Lik Charles Barkley trying to shoot a free throw,you just have to keep throwing it out ther until it works no matter how many times that takes him.

Now I have tried other services, and I have found them wanting as well. There are problemstend to revolve around their ability to get a payment to a destinationon the date they promised that they will. Yahoo has a little bit of a problem with this with CheckFree but it’s not as severe as most other online bill payment services.

So while it is extremely frustrating to have to resubmit a paymen tover and over and over again,because there’s almost nothing worse than having to be reminded that you’re paying a bill 20 times when you just want to pay it and get it over with, it is actually a little worse when you think you sense a payment in the payment doesn’t get there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Bill Payment Services, Failing to Improve, Online Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.