Another Google Tool To Take On PayPal?

An anonymous reader writes to mention a ZDNet post about another possible product in the grand Google vision. The product, Google Checkout, may be an attempt to go after PayPal. From the article: "Since we know Google is behind its registration, what is Google Checkout going to be? I think it will be a shopping cart system to help websites accept payment for their items online. The money site owners make will be deposited into a holding account at Google -- just like AdSense works. Isn't this starting to sound a lot like PayPal? Who knows, they could even offer a Google branded Mastercard "debit card" like PayPal's ATM/Debit Card -- after all, the domain googlemastercard.com is registered to Google too."

Comments

You midunderstand

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Checkout is Google's new dating service. They let you check-out other singles in your area.

Re:You midunderstand

[jdray]

Have you ever wondered if Google just registers domains, then waits for the Googlewatching community to post punditry on what it might be, then decide what to do with it? Stranger things have happened.

Re:You midunderstand

[zippthorne]

Uh oh. Dilbert's been talking about this very thing recently. scary.

This could only be a good thing

[strider44]

Perhaps they can make a paypal that actually doesn't suck. After all Google isn't supposed to be evil.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[killjoe]

I don't see how it could suck more or be more evil then paypal. If MS ends up buying paypal/ebay as it's rumored then all the more so reason to use Google.

As a corporation I trust google much more then I trust ebay/paypal or MS or even Visa for that matter.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[chrisxkelley]

Have you actually had any bad experiences with paypal? I have read through these Paypal Sucks websites and find some of the stories to be quite far-fetched. I have been using Paypal for years, and never had any problems. A representative from paypal actually called my house phone about ten minutes after I had sold a laptop to a buyer with a fraudulent credit card, informing me of the situation and telling m enot to ship the item. I was very impressed. They know their stuff, and they honestly dont suck. Now if M$ buys them up i'm not going to be so sure, because they are the last people I would want to have access to my bank account / credit card info.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[Rix]

Paypal treats anyone outside the US like dirt, so it'd be great to have an alternative.

Think about what they'd have done if you *had* shipped that laptop. Would they have taken responsibility for their mistake? I doubt it. It's easy not to suck if you only look at the best case scenarios.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[Ruff_ilb]

Meh, porn is pretty much essential to the internet, or is at least a large part of it, wheras guns aren't.

It's in the policy page, he said that he has read and accepted the policies... at that point, it's his problem.

I don't see how this is a bad thing, necessarily.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[chrisxkelley]

Would they have taken responsibility for their mistake? Yes - they offer up to $1000 of fraud protection for ebay sales, which is about how much I sold it for.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[techno-vampire]

It's easy not to suck if you only look at the best case scenarios.

Very true. It's also hard not to suck if you only look at the worst cases, as that site listed above clearly does.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[killjoe]

Isn't it illegal to transport guns across state lines?

Re:This could only be a good thing

[Aladrin]

TFA explains the procedure needed to legally ship guns across state lines. It isn't fun, but it's legal.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[yog]

Paypal is OK for small transactions, but they constantly annoy me with demands to get "verified" by giving them my bank account number, something I don't wish to do. But I have to click past this demand screen every time I log in. Also, they limit my transaction size for arbitrary reasons. I have a credit card with a ridiculously high credit limit, and I have superb credit, yet they won't let me pay more than two or three hundred dollars because I'm not verified. What's the issue here. I use my credit card all the time for multi-thousands of dollars transactions with other people but Paypal needs my bank account number to do a $500 transaction?

I look forward to Google giving Paypal some healthy competition, especially if Microsoft really does buy EBay, which owns Paypal. Google has a way of implementing very elegant solutions, such as for example their gmail product and their video search. Bring it on, Google!

Re:This could only be a good thing

[Dare nMc]

Under federal law, you may lawfully transport your guns if you have the lawful right to possess them where you reside, and also in the place where you are transporting the guns to.

to comply with that using a shipping company they will only ship from a licensed gun dealer to another licensed gun dealer. But you as a owner can drive across state borders legaly (except maybe california, other states don't require out of state hunters to have local permits to carry a unloaded firearm that is in some way secured with a lock, ie in the truck.)

Re:This could only be a good thing

[kimvette]

I have.

I don't use it often, so when I need to use it to pay for something (a vendor too fucking cheap to get a merchant account, e.g. Abit's RMA department)), Paypal sits on my money for a week before they will actually let me pay the vendor, and when I get refunded, they sit on the damn money again before I can take my money, and they're collecting interest on it all the while. Paypal is the epitome of evil and I do business via paypal only when I have absolutely no alternative. My alternative where Abit is concerned is to never buy their products again, then I do not have to deal with their crappy RMA process. I buy Asus or Foxconn instead - those companies have their act together and do it right.

Re:This could only be a good thing

[killjoe]

"Microsoft wants you to buy their software and they try to give you little choice in this. That can be annoying, but at least it's straightforward and obvious."

They also have a fantastic track record of stabbing virtually all of the parners in the back, playing loose and fast with the law, acting in an anti-consumer manner, lying, cheating and stealing. Clearly morals, ethics, and general goodness is not a high priority at MS.

"Suddenly Google has knowledge of which ads not only lead to clicks, but lead to purchases. But it gets even better. Because they are able to identify you when you make the purchase, they can tie all the information they have on you to both the click-through and the purchase. Right now they can charge more for selling ad words that are more likely to generate searches, but imagine if they could charge more for advertising to people who are more likely to click-through and make purchases. They're not just selling the words anymore, they're selling you! "

MS is already selling you on their desktop. Ms knows your name, address and phone number if you registered using your real name. Ms can track you personally using passport and they can force you to use passport to update windows.

"Of course the people at Google are very smart. So smart that they're actual plan for how to use this data could be far more sinister than what I've come up with in five minutes."

The question is will they use it in a sinister manner. We know Ms has a long and storied history of sinister behavior, we know that google so far has not acted in such a sinister manner.

if this happens...

[smartfart]

If Microsoft buys eBay and Paypal, I'm going to cancel my account immediately. If Google comes up with a competing service, that'd be great.

Failing that, what's a decent alternative to Paypal?

Re:if this happens...

[Cheapy]

What are your reasons for canceling your account if MS takes them over?

Re:if this happens...

[SeaFox]

Gee, would you want your bank account directly accessable by a company with the security and privacy record of Microsoft?

If they acquired PayPal, they would convert it over ot MS servers, just like they did Hotmail.

Re:if this happens...

[OverflowingBitBucket]

If Microsoft buys eBay and Paypal, I'm going to cancel my account immediately.

Good luck, it took around two weeks and a few emails on a zero-balance year-long inactive account for me to cancel mine. They wouldn't close it on my request, of course, and copy-pasted a set of instructions (that didn't work) in reply to each email. They wouldn't close it themselves, though. They basically ignored that part of my request each time. Admittedly I had lost the password, so it is partly my fault. Glad I'm out though.

This Just In

[Anonymous Coward]

The janitor at Google bought a new mop. Someone post it to the slashdot frontpage.

Re:This Just In

[Ohreally_factor]

All you need to know is that it wasn't an evil mop, and that the domain googlemops.com has not yet been registered.

Google Checkout?

[Freaky Spook]

Im sure it can't compete with the One-Click checkout :)

great!

[Anonymous Coward]

this would be great, I know from personal experience that running merchant systems is a major pain the neck. This particularly the case when you are a programmer trying to break into to the world of running your own business. Merchant and credit card systems that exist are really dev friendly and extremely expensive for the most part. The system I current use is propay.com just because it is so simplistic for my small site.

*sigh* more speculation

[strider44]

The problem with the article is that it's basing an awful lot on just a domain name. I could think of many other things it *could* be, like a shopping store, an auction site a la ebay, and more. It could also be a simple ecommerce software site, which I think is the most likely. My biggest counter to the argument for a paypal site is if this Google Checkout is a commercial venture like PayPal, why haven't they snabbed GoogleCheckout.com?

Re:*sigh* more speculation

[Ctrl Alt De1337]

If you read the article more closely, you'll see that the author came to the conclusion that the company that owns googlecheckout.com is directly tied to the one that is known to work with Google. In that sense, googlecheckout.com is already owned by Google.

In any event, this may or may not happen. It may not be anything more than Google noticing online rumors about it possibly starting a PayPal-like service and then deciding to buy the domain either to keep its options open or to prevent phishers or squatters from getting it. Or it could be as the parent described. It certainly would fit in with some aspects of Google Base, but people have made many persuasive arguments for what Google should do and then not see the company do it. After all of the furor over GDrive.com a few months ago, there's still not anything up on that page. Maybe, maybe not. I'll believe it when I see it. Google is second only to Apple when it comes to unsubstatiated/bogus romors.

Keeping the dogs out of the internet ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's money spinning machine has just one huge flaw. You geeks know that. By design nobody can tell which of those clicks on ads are from real people and which ones are from dogs (and monkeys and bots).

They are not fighting PayPal. They want to charge customers not for delivering clicks but for delivering customers. If the clickers on the ads actually use their checkout service to buy then who cares if the clicker is a dog or a bot. It is a dog who has cash to spend.

Re:Keeping the dogs out of the internet ...

[fizzfaldt]

If the clickers on the ads actually use their checkout service to buy then

This could turn out to be very interesting.
This could definately help out with click fraud if they charge by the purchase/customer instead of click,
or have some form of tiered system where purchases/customers are charged a certain amount, and clicks another.

If they get in between the credit card processors/banks and the online stores then we get another benefit.
Google could not actually pass the credit card information to the store, limiting the number of databases that
have your personal information.
We could also have user profiles making checkout much easier (compare to having a user account for every single online store you ever use.)
I imagine this would also help combat credit card fraud, when online stores have access to some kind of reliability score for a user.
The reverse would be true: Not giving credit information to the store (helps) prevents them from scamming you.

I wouldn't mind having being able to search/store online receipts in a repository either, although I can see how some might given the privacy concerns.

Re:Keeping the dogs out of the internet ...

[fizzfaldt]

I imagine they could act as a credit card processor.
i.e. when you want to checkout, you use a google checkout page.
I am reminded of the yahoo store checkout pages.

Of course some vendors would want their own checkout, and this introduces a new form of fraud
as you stated. Where only Google loses in this case. (Compared to click fraud where both
Google (in reputation and refunds) and the customer loses.)

Somebody call ZDNet...

[mattmacf]

...and tell this blogger that googlewildspeculation.com is still available.

Re:Somebody call ZDNet...

[Grey Ninja]

I just sat here for 5 minutes thinking about that actually, after I read what you said. I sat here and thought that was a terrible idea for the first 2.4 minutes. Then I started to think about how awesome that would be, if it were real.

I mean, just imagine it. Google has a site that's based entirely upon wild speculation. Anyone can post any sort of speculation, be it meaningful or not. And the speculation could be searched entirely. If by some chance the speculation came true, then Google news could automatically search through the speculations for the relevant information. And then they could have ranking links below the story. Saying something like "This story was predicted by ____ web sites", with a link to the Google Wild Speculation search. And they could have rankings of all people who write speculation for the Google Wild Speculation site. So in that way, you could find out if perhaps you were psychic, or were really good at predicting the future. Pyschics on TV would be out of jobs when it was found out that they had a 0.0001% speculation rate on Google Wild Speculation.

Meanwhile, Google would find all the real psychics, and would hire them up. Then Google would have psychics to control our minds.

Yeah, that would be awesome. I should go code that right now.

Google acting like... Google.

[aquowf]

You must remember, this is google we are talking about. World domination isn't world domination unless you own a pay-pal like service.

There is no real competition to PayPal

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, there is no real competition to PayPal. By competition, I mean an alternative service that charges the same level of percentage per sale.

There are a lot of PayPal type players out there, with much more evolved services, but they all charge 5-12% on every deal, which is too brutal. If google could match paypal's percentages and offer a nicer service, PayPal would suffer greatly.

A big list of upcoming services

[NanoServ]

Google registered a domain, so therefore they must be planning a service around it? Wow. Let's take a look at some other domains Google has registered...

Gbrowser.com - I wonder how that's doing.
Googleblows.com - Hm.. so much to speculate on.
Googledoodle.com - A drawing platform, maybe?
Googleporn.com - It's about time!

Here's my favorite: Googlemotherf**ker.com.

Google regularly buys domain names just so others won't. The fact that they bought googlecheckout.net might just mean they don't want someone else masquerading as a Google checkout service.

Re:A big list of upcoming services

[aevan]

Googleporn.com - It's about time!

I thought we already had Google Images??

No Thanks.

[John_Booty]

I love Google for the most part, and use a great deal of their free products - search (duh), Google Desktop Search, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Notebook, etc.

However, I do not trust them with my money. I had the same experience with Google Adsense that many people have had - account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal right before my first check was due. I never saw a penny.

Realistically, I'm sure that Checkout will be handled by a different internal group within Google. I don't know if they'll have the same "we'll take your money with no explanation" attitude as the Adsense group. But you can count me right the heck out.

Also, for the record... while PayPal horror stories also abound, I've had no problem with them even after several thousand transactions. I'm quite happy with them. If Google Checkout is a PayPal competitor, I know which side I'm on. Until convinced otherwise.

Re:No Thanks.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problems with adsense are just as anecdotal as those with PayPal. I haven't had any issues with either, but it just pays to pay attention. Google has gotten a little on the big side, so it pays to be as wary as with buying into a product of any company of that size, like Microsoft or AT&T.

Re:No Thanks.

[.com b4 .storm]

account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal

And that's worse than what PayPal does to many people... how? PayPal has done much worse, with actual money for sales and services. Real money that is in their account, not just the couple of bucks they supposedly "earned" through advertising.

Re:No Thanks.

[John_Booty]

I agree that the problems are anecdotal. My experiences are just one more data point and should of course be taken with the appropriately grain of salt.

PayPal does, at least, have some semblence of an appeals process. Although it's said to be quite lacking to say the least, at least it exists. They also tend to give some kind of reason as to what the problem was when payments are canceled and/or accounts are frozen.

Google seems shadier. Now, as you say, this is anecdotal. But Adsense account freezes almost always seem to take place right before the first check is due to be cut. In my case I had AdSense ads up for 2-3 months and generated quite a chunk of change for Google before they conveniently pulled the plug right before cutting me a check. I wound up with nothing. I'm not sure if they detected "suspicious" clicks on my Adsense ads or what, but they nullified all my earnings. Surely the vast majority of those earnings weren't suspicious.

Re:No Thanks.

[Seahawk]

Just a though:

If you were to make a system that detected false clicks in an advertising system, how would you implement it:

1. Run an analysis on EVERY click that comes in, with huge costs associated
2. Have some code that analysed clicks every week, even though money was only sent every month
3. Have som code that analyzed clicks just before you were about to send money

I'm not saying Google are saints(But I'm inclined to believe they are pretty good guys), but option 3 definately looks the most sensible to me :)

Re:No Thanks.

[wfberg]

No complaints process might work out better for you than a crappy one. If they don't have a complaints process, you can take them to small claims court immediately, since you've exhausted all your options of dispute resolution within the service's framework.

I know what it is

[kahrytan]

Garett Rogers has it all wrong.

Google maybe setting up a new and improved Froogle with Store Fronts similar to Yahoo Shopping.

"Google Checkout" could be used for stores in froogle to accept payments.

Response to Microsoft's impending eBay buyout?

[Mr_eX9]

Perhaps this is Google's response to the recent news regarding Microsoft's interest in acquiring eBay, which owns PayPal.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see a new google channel that directly competes with eBay's online marketplace in the near future.

A Whole New Meaning

[Alethes]

Adds a whole new meaning to "I'm Feeling Lucky" now, doesn't it?

Re:A Whole New Meaning

[binkzz]

You call yours Lucky?

Re:A Whole New Meaning

[70Bang]

Or, as a guy in college said when a girl walked by, "I wouldn't kick that girl out of bed for eating crackers....would I, 'Crackers'?" (patting his crotch at the appropriate time.

Making such a mistake so early in his college career (first week of school) and earning the nickname of Crackers. When addressed as such, the ladies wanted to know the derivation and he always had to tap dance around it.

As a reasonably small (1'900 students), midwestern, non-denominational Christian university, there were a lot of sensitive ears and everyone knew everyone else. Should he have responded honestly to the wrong person, he might have found his social life a bit empty for some time.

(But it was still fun to watch him deal with the name across a couple of years)

Stop speculating.

[Godman]

What's with all the speculation about what google is going to do next? So they own a few domains... they've had gbrowser.com for like a year now... it means squat.

If you were a company with lots of money in the bank, wouldn't you register domain names for 10 bucks a pop that have your name in them, to prevent squatters and to keep your options open? I'm sure google has hundreds of domains, and not all of them will turn out to be new google ideas at all...

Re:Stop speculating.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

The Google guys must laugh their asses off about this stuff. Either that, or it's a kind of public brainstorming. "Okay, nobody came up with anything especially cool for gbrowser, let's register googlebeans and see if anybody comes up with a product we can sell."

My guess..

[johnnyk427]

My guess is that its a service to allow, among other things, detecting which click throughs on Ad-Sense actually result in sales (by performing those sales directly) and basing the advertising charge on that as commision, which would at the very least solve the problem of fradulent click-throughs.

Lack of integration with ebay will kill it

[Radi-0-head]

I think Google would have an extraordinarily difficult time becoming the "de-facto" standard for online payments through ebay, considering PayPal is deeply entrenched within the ebay framework. I'd have to imagine the market for other person-to-person micropayments outside of online auctions isn't very large.

Re:Lack of integration with ebay will kill it

[suv4x4]

. I'd have to imagine the market for other person-to-person micropayments outside of online auctions isn't very large.

Yup, no micropayments outside eBay, no other countries than USA, no other language than English.

Re:Lack of integration with ebay will kill it

[whizzard]

I'd have to imagine the market for other person-to-person micropayments outside of online auctions isn't very large.

And that's why Google will unveil gbay next!

Re:Lack of integration with ebay will kill it

[ClamIAm]

Lots of smaller sites that sell stuff use paypal (think indie bands, etc). Lots of not-selling-stuff-sites accept Paypal donations.

You knew it was coming..

[Riden]

Using your internet connection to find a hot date through Google.com; $50/m Trying to impress her by dining at the fanciest restaurant in town; $350 Telling the waiter to "Stick it on your Google"... Priceless!

isn't there something like this besides PayPal

[krunk4ever]

If I had to say, it sounds a lot more like Yahoo! Stores than PayPal:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/

probably maybe less fees.

Re:Does anyone else have a sense that...

[Jafafa Hots]

"Does anyone else have a sense that the next 5 years are going to be really interesting?"

The next five years are always interesting.

Suicide...

[ItsIllak]

Clearly a new site to allow people to leave suicide notes to their friends and family...

See the Fish!

Re:GoogleWiki

[dotoole]

What do you think the internet is?

Who are you?

[dwalsh]

"... It is a dog who has cash to spend."

Why are you posting anonymously, BadAnalogyGuy?

Replace both...

[phorm]

Unless they become the replacement for both ebay and paypal.

Ebay's become a cesspool anyhow, with severely overrated shipping costs ($50 shipping with a $1 item still shows the item as $1 in the listings), people selling "how buy get a cheap X" crap, and much more. The days of low-bid bargains seem to have gone past, and the present reality is that you have to do a lot of searching just to find the real item.