Google Checkout: Pros and Cons
July 3, 2006Google just launched their payment system which some have compared to Ebay’s Paypal service. When I first heard about Google Checkout launching I decided to setup an account and test it out. I added the Google Checkout button to the order pages on PortableChangingRoom.com and today I just received my first order through the system.
I actually expected much more from it considering all the hype by the media. There was all kind of talk of the Google Checkout killing Paypal, but it is a much watered-down version of Paypal.
Below are several reasons why I believe Google Checkout is not as good as Paypal:
- Cannot make payments from person-to-person.
- Cannot store funds in the Google Checkout system,
- Doesn’t pay 4.85% return on balance.
- Doesn’t offer a debit card that pays 1% bonus on every purchase you make.
- Doesn’t have a fully functional checkout system. (ie. no shipping, weight, or quantity fields)
- System doesn’t provide you email address of your customer… big problem for most merchants.
- Not user-friendly from a merchant point of view doesn’t integrate well with websites… especially large dynamic websites.
- Not integrated into popular shopping cart system (yet)
- Not widely accepted and trusted (yet)
These are just a few I reasons I can think of… basically the system will get the job done, but has a lot of catching up to do to be at least on par with Paypal. However, I will try my best to at least offer the ability for customers to pay through Google Checkout on website I own and manage as I don’t want to miss out on any sales because of lacking payment option. A few years ago before I accepted Paypal… there was a trickle of customers that would ask if I accepted Paypal and when I said no, I never heard from them again. It’s now estimated that about 10% of sales are paid through Paypal… why give up those sales if you don’t have to? Google Checkout I’m sure will be used by the avid Google fans and they will seek out retailers that specifically accept Google Checkout. I’ve even read about some people on the forums saying they were going to buy.com to buy something just to try it out.
Therefore, on PortableChangingRoom.com, I have added it as an option to the regular shopping cart system. However, I said earlier, it will be much more difficult to integrate into my larger sites such as JLRyan.com or ChamplainCoffee.com as each product needs to be custom coded on Google’s website… I cannot simply load the Google Checkout’s code into my website and have the products automatically sync with Google’s system like I could with Paypal. This is fine with a 1 to 10 product website, but is a real pain if you have website with 500 products. I imagine they will improve this in the future.
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 using Google Checkout… meaning that you could get all your payments processed free of charge as opposed to paying 2.49% plus .20/ transaction with a traditional merchant account.
If you are interested in adding Google Checkout to your website and would like our help, please contact me.