Cash, Check, Google? Another Way to Pay on the Way
|
Written By Reprise Media | June 12, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Big G has been testing an online payment system for a few months now in relative quiet (SE Roundtable has the blow-by-blow), but articles from Forbes and Bloomberg trumpet June 28th as the day we’ll see it in wide release. If that’s true, they’d better settle on a name pretty quick - we’ve seen it referred to alternately as Google Payments, Google Checkout and GBuy.
Google’s release will offer an alternative to the omni-present PayPal system, owned by…oh, hey, eBay! We were just talking about you! GBuy (or G-product-yet-to-be-officially-named) differs from PayPal in that it won’t be a “stored value” system. In executing transactions, GBuy will take buyers off sellers’ sites - this will help provide Google with detailed data about the exchange, and hopefully lead to better “targeting in future searches,” says Forbes.
Sellers who choose to use GBuy to mediate purchases on their sites will be stamped with the seal of a “trusted GBuy merchant” in Google search results, which theoretically could lead to better conversions - if buyers trust Google. John Battelle plays skeptic, saying that he’s “not sure the world is ready to trust Google with its payments,” and that “the overall cultural vibe on Google is that it’s gaining too much power.” Still, he predicts a solid product launch, as opposed to some recent haphazard releases that have resembled “spaghetti against the wall.”
Google is undoubtedly the big dog getting bigger. But if we increasingly trust Google with our searches, our email and all other kinds of data, why not our cash? Whether we can stomach the thought or not, GBuy has its work cut out for it against an entrenched PayPal.
Topics: Google |