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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?)
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.
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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?
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.
AdWords and AdSense probably qualify as "huge".
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.
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