Google Checkout PROS and CONS

[Aileen]

Google Checkout, provided by Google, an online payment processing service aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. This feature was first made available in the United States and later became available in the UK on April 13, 2007. It is a convenient way of participating or purchasing from stores in as easy as one click. It offers fraud protection and page for tracking purchases and their status.

One major benefit of Google Checkout is that, they are supposed to be giving you a credit of up to 10 times your Google Adwords spending towards merchant fees when you use it. The service charges merchants 2.0% plus $0.20 per transaction. Recently, Google has decided to charge $0 for processing until December 31, 2007.

Despite of some advantages it offers, a lot of people keep on complaining due to some reasons:

First, it is not user-friendly for merchants because it doesn't integrate well with websites, especially the large ones. Also, it doesn't keep track or provide customer's email address. It also doesn't support payments from person-to-person and doesn't pay 4.85% return on balance.

For the shopper's point of view, features are still limited, it doesn't have a fully functional checkout system like the weight of an item, shipping infos and quantity fields. It is not yet integrated into popular shopping cart system and not yet widely accepted and trusted. More importantly, it doesn't offer a debit card that pays 1% bonus on every purchase you make.

Still, in the field of affiliate marketing, whether you are a merchant or an affiliate, we still have to continue researching the best ways and alternatives for the growth of ebiz and to come up with the best strategy.

[Octavian]

I've read in other postings that Google Checkout is a big threat to affiliate networks. From your posting, it's really true, isn't? What's going to happen now to my one month old affiliate business?

[Aileen]

Yes, we must admit that some features of Google Checkout is not that stable since they are still developing it for better access. However, they created Google Checkout Developers Forum to assist people to fix some bug problems and even update them with the latest and improvised API features, news from the checkout sample code, etc.

They also updated the SSL certificate for checkout.google.com from a wildcard certificate (*.google.com) to a certificate specifically issued for checkout.google.com.

Also, to help you choose an SSL certificate that works with Google Checkout, they created a wiki page to collect the names of SSL products that merchants are successfully using. You can check this site for more info.

http://www.google.com/checkout/ssl-certificates

Since you have started to use Google Checkout a few months ago, I suggest that you have to research for the latest updates to help you in expanding your business.

[prince24]

thanks aileen for the precious information

[Ronald Marva]

I think Google Checkout has a lot more to improve before it become a respected online payment processor. But given its name and resources they can accomplish this in no time...I would like to see how merchants and consumers accept this new service from Google.