Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches PayPal Rival
Google Checkout Launched
Roy van Rijn informs us that Google's new online payment system is now online. "Under the name Checkout, the venture offers an incorporated manner to search, advertise and pay. If you buy something on Checkout, 2% and $0.20 go to Google. Paypal, the biggest competitor uses 1,9% and $0,30. Analysts compare Google/Paypal to for example Visa/Mastercard living peacefully together, while others predict the end of Paypal."
W3K adds "You can use your Google account to store an unlimited number of credit cards and addresses. The service allows you to track all your orders and shipping in one place," and adds a link to a quick video tour.
NYT times also has a interesting article on this with quotes about Google's plans on what they want to do with this product.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
My biggest question is if I can use my checkout funds to pay for stuff. I live in Greece, so I can't withdraw PayPal funds (cheaply, anyway), but I can use it to pay for my hosting/online shopping. If I can't do this with Google Checkout, it's all but useless to me.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I think the most important thing about this entire endeavor is that it is the first Google product that plans on actually introducing a revenue stream besides advertising to the company (especially since the Google Pay Video system has more or less fell through at this point in time.)
I'm not quite sure what that means for the long-term health of the company, but I suspect that the more streams of revenue a company has, the more likely they are to become conservative, entrenched, and reluctant to embrace change. Google has managed to avoid all that because they've had a strong beam focus on a single revenue stream (ad dollars) - as they start matriculating, I suspect that beam focus will dissipate.
But then again, they're Google - they just work smarter than basically every other company out there today. So I put nothing out of their reach.
4.7% interest on money contained in paypal accounts, no minimum. That's hard to beat for a pretty liquid fund of money.
While we all love Google and everything it produces over here on slashdot, I don't think that they are going to crash PayPal's party in the too near future.
This is what they said when Blockbuster started competing with NetFlix, but NetFlix is doing quite alright by themselves, and PayPal is, in my opinion, in better shape in their space than NetFlix was. PayPal and eBay are pretty good bed buddies, and PayPal is already accepted on thousands of other websites. People know the name, people have used it before, people know it works.
Regardless of how great the product Google produces turns out to be, people will still use PayPal as long as PayPal remains competitive, which I imagine it will. I mean, for all the people who rave and rant about how amazing Gmail is, the mailing list that my mom's quilt shop has accumulated is saturated with yahoo, hotmail, and aol addresses, with not a single gmail address to be found out of a few thousand names.
> 2% and $0.20
So they didn't want to just take the 2% so it could be used by websites to charge tiny amounts of money per page/hour etc? $0.20 blows that intriguing possibility out of the water. They could accrue the amounts spent until it reached some value where the transaction was worth performing, if they're worried about thousands of $0.001 hits slowing down their system or costing too much to run.
Before Google Checkout has much hope of usurping PayPal, they'll need to accept more payment options.
Paypal currently allows payment direct from a bank account (I don't expect Google to need this), Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Delta, Maestro, Visa Electron, Solo, Discover, and more if you count their other services. That's at least 10 ways to pay.
Google, on the other hand, accept Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover. With only 4 ways to pay, I suspect Google Checkout is not an option for many people.
Disclaimer: I live in the UK and this is based on my experience with the UK PayPal service. I also agree with the sentiments of paypalsucks.com, and would like to see Google smash PayPal to pieces if they can Do No Evil. YMMV.
Google Checkout has been released today. From their blog: We've heard time and again from users: "I find great stores through Google search, but every time I try to buy from an online store, I have to re-enter the same billing, shipping, and credit card information. There are too many steps. Why can't it be as fast as a Google search?" This motivated us to improve the online purchase process, and so today we're announcing Google Checkout, a checkout option that makes buying across the web fast and easy."
Google CheckOut includes single signon and badges on adwords of merchants that use Google CheckOut.
Features include using many addresses and many different cards for buyers and a "Payment Guarantee" against chargebacks for sellers.
AdWords users get $10 in sales processed for free for every $1 spent on AdWords.
For those of us text weary, there are videos for buyers and sellers
Funny thing, I just signed up for checkout with my G Account and all I had to do is specify a different country.
I even tried buying something from Buy.com and got the Oops from Google.
"The service allows you^H^H^H them to track all your orders and shipping in one place"
Regards,
The nation's #1 tinfoil hat supplier!
Yeah - I don't like that my gmail password would now give someone access to my credit card if I were to sign up for Google checkout. I like to keep things more compartmentalized than that. For things like e-mail and other lower security things I use one set of passwords, but for PayPal I use a unique, much longer, and more secure one and make sure never to have my Browser store it.
Also, it's convenient to stay logged into Google for gmail, but I wouldn't want to do that at work if it gave access to my credit card! I think a seperate password, required each time you buy something, would be better than using your one password to the Googleplex.
I will be checking out the new CheckOut, with some initial testing in my violin business, and if the results are good, I may move all of my business away from Ebay.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
Actually, I'm inclined to disagree. There is a full API, and you can practically (as a seller) hide the fact you're using Google to process payments from the user if you wish. I'm writing an online store right now, and integration with Google appears to be less costly than having to get a merchant bank account and integrate with annoying APIs like Paymentech.
I like that Google placed the service on both a Paypal and full-out merchant level. Now I can do all payment processing on my site via the available web API, but still put the Google badge on the site to put buyers at ease.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The thing people like about PayPal is it lets you pay with a credit card. If I buy something using PayPal with a credit card and I don't receive it then one email to my credit card company will see the money returned.
Sure, you can do that, but then you'll get screwed by Paypal. I had an issue where the seller never shipped the item to me, and I first went through Paypal's dispute option in order to get my money back. However, they were either unable or unwilling to give me a refund, so I disputed the charge with my credit card company. Once Paypal got the chargeback, they permanently froze my service until I paid THEM the amount of my chargeback. Give money back to Paypal for an item I never received, and had just disputed? I don't think so. Needless to say, I haven't used them since (nor will I ever).