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Google Checkout Sees Poor Customer Satisfaction
Aryabhata writes "Ars Technica reports on a survey by investment firm J.P. Morgan Securities, stating that Google Checkout has had a relatively quick and modest market penetration of six percent since its launch in June of 2006, but lags behind in customer satisfaction vs PayPal. On the customer satisfaction front, only 18.8 percent reported having a 'good' or 'very good' experience with Google Checkout, while 81.2 percent indicated a fair to poor experience customer experience compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences. Some users have reported anecdotally that Google Checkout mistakenly canceled sales without warning or that the checkout process took too long."
That's an interesting point of view, because as far as I was aware the only Google services that have "taken off" have been their Search and GMail - anything else was either bought or has only had minor impact. Sure, they've dabbled in just about everything, but they certainly haven't expanded far past Search yet (unless I somehow missed something huge?)
So if one needs to have a US based address doesn't that render the service useless to anyone living outside of the US, who is buying goods for themselves or others?
//can't believe its not butter
hopefull teething troubles will get ironed out and service expanded. I know a few scots that are creaming to use it
It's probably a matter of compliance with national (i.e. non-US) trading and consumer rights laws and regulations.
Well, most services coming from US-based companies only support US residents. Most US merchants won't ship outside US - google checkout or not - and many won't accept non-US credit cards even for shipping within the US. It is unfortunate,...
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Not for the rest of the world. If US merchants refuse 6 billion customers, it's their loss.
As the report said, they have a higher penetration amongst early adopters. These are usually much harder to please, so unless the report compared satisfaction amongst the same groups, it won't be entirely accurate.
- These characters were randomly selected.
this is the first time i've heard of something touched by google not instantly turning to gold!
Hardly. Google has a lot of stuff which haven't really made an Impact
Orkut - successfull only in India & Brazil, not even close in the USA.
Google Talk - barely in the Top 10 IMs.
Google Finance - barely in the Top 50 finance sites
Google Blog Search - far behind Technorati
Lots more probably.
"compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences."
Are you sure you don't want to not use a non-credit card account to not complete this transaction? Give us access to an account you can't issue a chargeback with and we'll give you a shiny raffle ticket!
Seriously, with a numeric majority of those polled saying they didn't have a positive experience with PayPal, just how hard can it be to top them?
That is if everything goes perfectly. But its not that simple. You forgot issues like fraud, refunds, chargebacks, disputes, user errors, etc. You need need humans to handle such issues (especially when money is changing hands).
I have been thinking about why google got into this business, and why they were offering ridiculous amounts off (I used the $20 off of orders over $50 myself) to use the service.
Clearly, there is money to be made in the third party credit card processing biz. Witness Yahoo and Paypal.
Also, I think there is an advantage for them to have their own ecomm facilities. They are starting to offer pay services (one of the earliest I have seen is charging for more space in Picassa's online web album), and having a well established ecomm service will allow them to charge for a variety of other things easily. And, the more credit card orders they process, the better rates they get from credit card companies.
Finally, once they associate your financial information with your google account, they can use it to target advertising. If you read their privacy policy, they admit to doing just that (sharing non-transactional data from Google Payment Corporation and Google), but there is a way to opt out, although you can only do that through email, which seems really lame.
Thank you for your anecdotal evidence, now we can throw away the empiric data on 1100 customers.
Actually, you're wrong. I don't have any numbers, but I'm pretty sure...
"I don't know anything beyond my anecdotal evidence to support my personal bias, but I do know that you're wrong, and my purely opinion-based conclusion puts Googletalk in the 5th rank."
Wow, fucktard, are you a fanboy or astroturfer?
AdWords and AdSense probably qualify as "huge".
I can sympathize with your problems, however I also understand why Google would have done what they have done. I mean seriously Google cannot just tell you that your number has been blacklisted. Theoritically if you were the bad guy you now know not to use the number at Google, or even at all. If they don't say that will allow the Credit Card company to collect more information, and possibly catch the bad guy. Otherwise he simply moves onto the next poor fool's card number.
Now I do find it odd that your CC company did not call you to let you know. But perhaps that was because Google did not notify said company.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
A few months ago I developed a checkout system that used a number of payment options, I found google checkout to be the most complicated and the slowest when compared to paypals array of payment processing options (payflow pro, etc) or other merchant account setups.
. .to...finish.
Google checkout was the only processor (that I used) that had a distributed processing engine. Unlike say paypal where you execute a POST request and the response code comes back in the same transaction, google is more "fire and wait for a callback", you setup a callback URL to process the google checkout responses, then you start submitting your XML shopping carts and...just...wait...for...8...XML...transactions.
I'm not blaming XML here mind you, but after the user hits "submit" with their credit card information it takes 8 requests to fully process, and in the case of AMEX that timeframe is usually 30 minutes to an hour(ouch!) Compare at paypal which I've never seen take longer than 2 minutes, or a merchant account setup which takes 1-5 seconds.
This may be OK if you sell an actual product as the consumer is accustom to waiting a few days for their package to ship/arrive, however it is quite unacceptable when say, selling a service where most users are used to seeing (almost) immediate responses.
Also (at the time of my development) you cannot remove the shipping protocols out of the transaction, google requires you to acknowledge that yes in fact your order has shipped, even if there is no shipping of a product (very confusing for users when they receive a "your order has shipped!" email.)
As for the project I was working on, the clients decided google was too slow, they ended up dropping them as a payment option even though they had better rates than paypal.
Wah Sig!
Billionaires often feel that they are better than everyone else, and that they don't have to be open and honest. The billionaires who run eBay seem to think that way.
That's because eBay is verging on being a monopoly when it comes to online auctions. If there were an alternative that got anything like the audience eBay gets, I suspect a lot of users sick of their BS would switch over very quickly.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Orkut - successfull only in India & Brazil, not even close in the USA.
So, if it's not successfull in the USA, it doesn't count?
So say we all