Background
Google Wallet is a mobile payment system developed by Google that allows its users to store debit cards, credit cards, loyalty cards, and gift cards among other things, as well as redeeming sales promotions on their mobile phone. Google Wallet can use near field communication(NFC) to "make secure payments fast and convenient by simply tapping the phone on any PayPass-enabled terminal at checkout." The app was released in the United States on September 19, 2011.
Credit
Google wasn't the first company to attempt mobile payment nor was it the best implementation. But it was indeed the single largest company with enormous resources, a new innovative approach of implementation, a lofty vision and possessing the ability to reach millions of people almost instantaneously.
Business is a business and money is a priority, but what is different about Google is the mindset to solve problems first and worry about revenue generation later.
Google was able to trigger a race amongst competitors to come up with their own versions of mobile payment system.
What went Wrong
Technology of choice: NFC was an unproven technology with very less adoption. Google found it difficult to convince device manufacturers to make room for the real estate needed for an additional NFC chip, at a time when constantly slimming device size was the trend. Also not to mention the additional cost needed to upgrade the point of sale systems
Iterative approach: Google has history of coming up with amazing, innovative products; slowly improving one bit at a time; testing the adoption rate and if successful making it a part of the portfolio else completely scrapping the project. Some of the examples of scrapped projects are Notebook, Igoogle, Google Health and many more. As soon as google killed these products, many small players were able to get rich re-implementing those ideas.
With Google Wallet initial UI was ridiculous and non user friendly, ability to add and withdraw money was not there, ability to add loyalty cards was not there, integration with google offers was buggy. Not everything can be solved in an iterative approach, Sometimes it is important to come out with a big bang. Google should have invested more time and resources to think about all the pitfalls
Marketing: Google always used an organic growth and word of mouth approach. But on a product which can a bite out of multi billion dollar industry, it is worth spending money on marketing. Actually, google did try to market Google wallet in the initial days, but that was it.
Piece of the pie: Google faced extremely strong resistance from Carriers, Payment processing gateways, banks, other competitors like apple and Paypal. Single and only reason for that is mobile payment processing is a multi billion dollar industry and no one was willing to let go of their piece of the pie. Google was needed to be pushed back.
Mining: Google is the power house of data mining. But unfortunately google wallet does not harness Google's search, data mining, machine learning capabilities. Google wallet has no suggestion features built into it like suggesting which credit to use, showing offers of a store when one walks into a store, offer suggestion based on history and location etc.
Clouded Vision: The whole premise of Google Wallet was the ability to store and utilise virtually, everything that a physical wallet would. But Google recently came up with wallet card which adds one more card to the physical wallet(what was that about). Google should have at least worked with ATM providers like credit unions to make using Wallet card free, which at least would have given the ability to get rid of debit cards from the physical wallet
Whats the solution
All the issues discussed in what went wrong if attempted to be solved is the Solution
- Figure out a way to use bluetooth or other standard technologies with higher adoption to power google wallet
- Spend more marketing dollars
- Make the product more intelligent, utilise its search and mining expertise
- Acquire innovative start ups in this domain to give the wallet a nitrous boost in the race
- Invest more thought into the design and implement cleaner products
- Just cannot afford to fall behind in certain areas like social, mobile. Google learnt it the hard way with google plus and android. Need not be said that Mobile payment processing is definitely one of those. Definitely got to be on the fore front of this wave
