Finally, We Can Check Out Google Checkout
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Written By Reprise Media | June 29, 2006 | Share This
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Google’s long-rumored online payments system is finally launching today - we think. The official Google Blog post is up, the page is live (featuring a quick video demo), and the press is abuzz (exhibit A: ClickZ’s story); we just can’t find the thing on any of the participating merchants’ sites yet (UPDATE: now we can, see below).
Minor detail. At least they’ve settled on a name; it’s been alternately called ‘GBuy’ and ‘Google Payments,’ but ‘Google Checkout’ has won out.
And even if we can’t use it yet, at least we know what it is. Google Checkout is a transaction processing service that’s tied to AdWords (although a seller doesn’t need to be an AdWords advertiser in order to use it). Customers sign up, store their payment information with Google - that’s name, address, credit card, all that good stuff - and can then proceed with subsequent online checkouts using only a couple of clicks (as long as they’re dealing with a Google Checkout-approved merchant). This bypasses the arduous process of entering all that information for each transaction, which we understand can sometimes take upwards of thirty seconds.
Kidding aside, the time saving aspects of Google Checkout could attract customers to sellers who use the system. And if people are searching on Google, they should be able to easily spot a Google Checkout merchant - a little green shopping cart icon appears in their AdWords listings. And AdWords advertisers will have some incentive to try out Google Checkout themselves, since Google’s offering free processing on 10 dollars of purchases for every buck spent on AdWords. Non AdWords participants will get charged 20 cents and 2 percent of the sale for each transaction.
What Google checkout doesn’t do is store money in an online account or handle cash transactions between individuals. So it’s not exactly a PayPal alternative (as was the rumor), although maybe Google wishes it was, since SE Roundtable spotted a poll on DigitalPoint indicating that 38 percent of respondents would switch from PayPal to ‘GBuy’ before anyone had even touched it - and that number’s now up to 44 percent. Still, Google Checkout will probably give PayPal some competition in the online transaction space, even if it reminds us of nothing so much as a souped-up version of the old Gator eWallet.
We do have some questions, though, in addition to “when are we really going to get to buy something with it?” Google says that Checkout doesn’t do digital products like music downloads, but they also say that you can use it to buy clips off of Google Video (huh?). More importantly, does having that little shopping cart icon in your ad drive up your quality score or otherwise affect rankings? Are most online shoppers even going to notice the icon or understand what it means?
Finally, what happens if something goes wrong with a transaction? If you buy something but receive the wrong item, a broken item, or nothing at all, Google would do well to avoid issuing a response like ones we’ve gotten from PayPal: ‘yes, you didn’t get what you paid for. Yes, we gave them your money. No, you’ll never see it again.’
UPDATE: Google checkout is now live. We’ve seen the checkout buttons on sites like Bluefly and we spotted the little green shopping cart in a Buy.com ad (pictured right).
Topics: Google |
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