Google Checkout
Gbuy, Gcheckout, Google Payments etc…. the news has been circulating for months – Google will compete with Paypal. Well, Google Checkout has finally launched and is being covered by most every outlet covering online news (including several of Google’s blogs are talking about this latest product launch from google. It seems to be US only at this point and there are a couple of interesting twists.
One thing that I saw is that if you’re an adwords advertiser you can process $10 in payments for every $1 you spend in adwords. (Without processing fees)….. so, a $1000 adwords budget can net you $10000 in “free” transactions. Above that (and if you’re not an adwords advertisor) you get a 2% fee + 20 cents on each transaction, which is a bit lower than Paypal’s going rate. (2.9% + 30 cents a transaction).
Much like Paypal – you can use the Google Checkout login information to send payments along to vendors in the Google Checkout system. It doesn’t look like it matches paypal feature by feature. However, it does seem to have some nice features. A lot of people see this as a “paypal killer” I seriously doubt that, although I suspect uptake of this new service will be fairly quick. I see room for several online payment processing options (like visa/mastercard/discover, etc…. are accepted many places we might see paypal/google checkout accepted at many online sites.)
It will be interesting to see what kind of uptake there is. I can’t imagine that this won’t be adopted quickly by many online businesses.