Googles new payment system - any thoughts?

[vokf]

Google have released their payment system "checkout".

http://checkout.google.com

It has an API, so I guess a CC mod could be done :-)

At the moment its US only (pah!)

Its far too early to comment on customer service etc.

The fees are:

2% of transaction + $0.20 -but this can be reduced or even eliminated if you advertise on AdWords.

There is some small print - they retain the $0.20 for any refunds.

For comparison, PayPal's base fees are 3.4% + £0.20 (sorry, not to sure of the USD fee)

Reductions in PayPal's fees are based on Monthly turnover.

I'm stuffed, as I'm in the UK, have any of our US friends here used it?

Jason

[roban]

I'll let you know. I just signed up and trying to figure out the API integration.

[Robo_1]

I've got a friend who's recently been badly stung with Paypal, as a customer used credit charge-back on him, and he lost both his money and the product.

Of course there is no way of knowing if this new Google pay option would have been any better, but Paypal definitely needs some real competition, and coupled with their cheaper rates, I'll certainly be giving it a go as soon as Cubecart supports it.

[Al Brookbanks]

I'm extremely keen to integrate it with a future release.

[Guest StudioX64]

I just thought that I would share my view on Google Checkout. I run one of the UK's top websites for a particular industry. We were among one of the first online sites to have GC integration right from the launch date. Whilst Google were offering the £10 off purchases over £30 we had around 20 orders coming in daily as a result. I estimate that around 30-40% of these orders were fraudulent. In no short time word was spread around the online fraud community and more and more people were signing up and making purchases through Google Checkout. One thing that was really obvious was that there was no formal policing by Google regarding their £10 off £30 for first time signup's rule. Basically customers would sign up under different Hotmail accounts on a near daily basis, each time claiming their £10 off. I spoke to someone at Google about it and they were very laid back, stating that very few people were abusing the system (yeah right!).

Since the launch (now about two months ago) we have continued to receive orders daily, which surprised me as I expected the orders to subside after the offer finished. From these orders we can clearly see that some are blatantly fraudulent. The benefit to us as a company is that we do not incur charge backs from them, so out go the goods and Google are left to foot the bill. There was definitely a change from Google about 3 weeks ago when we started to see some orders being rejected by Google on the basis that they were from known fraudsters, although I suspect a lot are still slipping through the net. On a positive side it would appear that the fraudsters are all going through Google Checkout and we have found a decrease in regular charge backs as a result.

From an integration point of view, it's not very nice. From a marketing point of view GC is terrible. We are not allowed to auto-opt customers email addresses into our mailing list, and as a result of customers not having accounts they loose out on all of our hard developed package tracking which regular customer have. If it wasn't necessary to maintain a competitive edge we would have dropped it immediately. From an accounting point of view it's a total nightmare! Reconciliation of money at the end of every week is just almost impossible. Considering that GC had been running for almost a year in the US, the software has the feeling of a very, very early Beta version.

[Robsta]

GC sounds much worse than PayPal. Is there any reason or benefit to taking the risk with their checkout?

Cheap fees maybe, but you'll lose much more with the fraudulent orders.

[vokf]

I'm using a quick hack to accept CG payment on my store.

I've not seen any Fraudulent activity (yet!).

I only ship to the customers registered address, and ensure the order passes the relevant checks.

I have proof of posting for most items, and anything reasonably valuable is sent recorded/signed for.

However, since adding the button to my product pages, I've increased my order numbers.

I'm now wondering if a similar PayPal button would help - but I'll then end up with CC being a CMS, and no central place for customer/order details.

Interesting thread though. I'll checkout out some other forums later, to see how widespread this is.

Jason