Billing Issues with Google Adwords Customers in India

For long Google Adwords Advertisers have regarded payment through credit card to be the best option for paying their adwords bills. There were few hiccups in the system, which resulted into frequent Payment Decline situations, but scenario since, Aug, 1st, 2009, changed completely making it the worst form of payment option. Issues related with payment through credit cards are:

1. It is difficult to authenticate in the first place. Before the first billing of Account creation charge, you have to try it many times.
2. Google has imposed manual verification of credit cards on advertisers against the online verification asked by RBI. Many are concerned about the security of information revealed in this process.
3. Some advertisers claim, Google has charged more than amount spent and that too multiple times.
4. Ads frequently stops and you have to go through traumatic phases of reviews by their customer support team.
5. There are reported events when advertisers were unable to modify/add credit card information into their account.

Other form of payment which is working well is Pre Payment Through Net Banking, which uses third party gateway. One may wonder why does not google uses similar third party payment gateway for processing credit card transactions too. Many people who were using credit card earlier for payment have decided to switch to net banking. It cannot be done within the same account. For this they have to create a new account and choose Net banking as Billing Preference, because billing preference can be edited only once in an account. Would Google be kind enough to waive off Rs 250 charge of account activation for such advertisers???

Indian advertisers had always been affected by the billing related issues with google. Indian Laws and tax structure typically requires some changes in the google's billing system for which google does not seem to be ready. Apart from credit card related issues, there are other issue related to taxes like TDS deduction, where Indian law requires it to be deducted at source and then to be claimed by the service provider. Google wants advertisers should first submit the proof of having deposited the TDS with Govt of India and then claim it from Google. Google does not publicly discloses its PAN number too, which is required for depositing the TDS amount.

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