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Happy 4th of July Everyone!

Since it is the beginning of the month, I'd like to talk about the technology available for making bill payments, since I recently had to make a rent payment. I recall as a child my mother would always have a stack of bills and a checkbook from which she would write out and tear several checks in order to pay the bills. If she waited too close to the deadline of the bill to send it in, we would get a phone call to the house asking where the payment was and stating that the company would wait a week or so before taking action against an "unpaid" bill. I remember thinking what a hassle it was to have to send a check overnight, just so that it would arrive at the company on time. Most of the time, as long as the check was postmarked for the due date, the payment would not be considered late, even if it arrived a couple of days after the due date.

I can imagine the frustration of companies having to constantly deal with snail mail in order to receive payments from customers, even moreso, I think it was much easier for customers to evade making payments by simply blaming the post office for losing payments. These days most payments seem to be made online. Just recently it came to my attention that I can even make payments to the phone company using my cell phone!

The technology available for online payment has become something I am fully dependent on because of the absolute convenience. Every month, I pay my rent online. Within the first week of the month, I receive my utilities bill in my e-mail inbox and with just 3 click I can pay that bill, from my very own e-mail. I use my mother's account information to pay the cellphone bill from my actual phone.

Even more exciting is ONLINE SHOPPING =D I remember when I was younger being upset when I would be in a store because they no longer had the item I had fallen in love with in my size. With online shopping that is no longer the case. You can fall helplessly in love with an item online and order it from home. Personally, I am not a very avid online shopper, I tend to prefer seeing things in person. But the convenience of online shopping has definitely made events such as holiday shopping a little less stressful.

Here's an interesting study that was done to determine the demographics that are most likely to use online payment services as well as various other online payment service statistics. It's interesting to not that education and marital status have an effect on whether or not someone is willing to shop or make payments online.

Hope everyone has a great 4th!

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Hogarth, Jeanne M. "Consumer payment choices: paper, plastic, orelectrons?." Int. J. Electronic Banking 1.1 (2008): 16-35. Web. 04 Jul 2010.