ClickandBuy

» see clickandbuy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

ClickandBuy started in Cologne in 1999, on a business model that Firstgate Internet AG had worked out. You registered once and left your bank details or your card number with ClickandBuy. After that you paid at any shop in the network by typing a name and a password, and your card number stayed in one place instead of being retyped into every site that wanted nine euros from you. In 1999 this was not a small promise. The web was full of small sellers asking for small amounts, and the banks of the time had no interest in processing any of it.

In 2006 the operating business moved to a newly formed British company, ClickandBuy International Limited, which ran on a UK license to issue and manage electronic money. Deutsche Telekom took a stake the same year and owned the whole company by 2010. From that point a national telephone company was running a consumer wallet, and it wanted a showcase for safe payment on the internet. For a while the partner list read like one. Apple accepted ClickandBuy, and so did Bwin.

Nothing came of it. On 3 December 2015 the company announced that everything would stop on 30 April 2016. No payment could be made through the service after that date and every partner contract ended with it, so customers were told to spend their balances or move them to a bank account before the deadline. Telekom confirmed that eighty jobs would go and published no figures at all for customer numbers or payment volume, which tells you roughly what those figures must have looked like.

I never had an account. ClickandBuy was wired into German and British checkout flows, and in Turkey the question was not which wallet to use at the checkout but whether a foreign site would take anything you had. You found someone with a card that worked abroad, or you did not buy the thing. The payment layer Europe kept building through the 2000s was smoothing out a friction I was experiencing as a wall.

~ the case file ~

~ how the checkout worked ~

Opening and running an account was free, and so was paying with it. Money moved by direct debit or card. You could also load a prepaid balance and spend down from that. You could set a monthly ceiling on what ClickandBuy was allowed to spend, which was a sensible idea that almost nobody copied. An account holding a balance that went untouched for a year started collecting fees, which is the sort of clause that reads as housekeeping until the service closes and you find out how much of your money has been quietly filed under dormancy.

There was a buyer protection scheme: if a parcel you had paid for never arrived, ClickandBuy would mediate and, after reviewing the claim, might refund the purchase price and the shipping. From mid-2012 the service had a phone app on both iOS and Android. The system was certified by TÜV, which in Germany is the stamp that persuades a cautious person to try something new.

~ the telekom years ~

Telekom bought in twice, taking about ten percent in August 2006 and the rest over the following four years. The strategic logic was readable from outside. A carrier already bills millions of households every month, and billing is the hard part of payments, so a carrier that owns a wallet should be able to undercut everyone. Telekom also had its own T-Pay brand to retire, and ClickandBuy was the better asset.

What the plan ignored is that a wallet is only worth having if the shops you already use accept it. Every year ClickandBuy spent recruiting merchants was a year PayPal spent recruiting merchants with a bigger head start, and by the time the smartphone changed where payments happened, the German market had Sofortüberweisung and the card schemes and a national habit of paying by invoice. ClickandBuy was competing against all of it from a standing start inside a telephone company.

~ the five month notice ~

The closure notice was unusually clean for this kind of death. The service told everyone the date and put up a long FAQ. Balance transfers stayed open, and existing payment agreements were handed to a collections agent. Nobody woke up to a dead login and an unreachable support address, which is the normal way a payment service ends.

It still demonstrated the thing a stored balance always means. The money in a ClickandBuy account was not your money in the sense a banknote is yours. It was a claim against a company, and when the company decided to stop, the claim came with a deadline attached.

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