Is it just me or does everyone else this GCO sucks. I tried GCO on my ecommerce site with terrible results. Essentially with GCO, you customer is google's instead of yours. The only way to set it up was to give my customers the option of doing google checkout rather than the integrated shopping cart to paypal option. Well with GCO the customer never actually sets up an account. So I have to go to GCO website to get the order information rather than my CMS. Plus the only email I get on the customer is the stupid @google-checkout.com email. I cannot use my integrated shipping rates. I have to set up separate shipping rates just for GCO customers. Then instead of simple going to Paypal and clicking "Print Shipping Label" next to the transaction, I have to go and set up a separate UPS or USPS account because GCO does not offer the shipping label options. What a piece of *&^%. Google has a long way to go before effectively competing with Paypal for payment processing.
I've been using it for about 2 months now, and I think it is superior to paypal in several ways, but it also does have it's drawbacks. As for useage, for my site it has greatly surpassed paypal, more than 5:1 google to paypal orders. What I find the most annoying about gco is the email address thing, and the fact that gco customers can use only their PO Box. We just ran into a situation where a customer used the google hidden email and used a PO box. We of course were unable to contact them, we don't ship to PO boxes, and you can guess what happened a week later. My other major issue with them is the difficulty in integrating with them. An XML SOAP Api is not something that any newbie programmer can use, and even someone with some good experience will have a hard time getting everything to mesh with gco. To circumvent the shipping issue, we saved an order in our database and sent the customer to gco only with a final price and an order number. We calculated shipping and tax on our own, and send the to google with the total. Once the card is successfully processed, we have the API script update our database, and then it looks just like a normal order to us. We also use the paypal IPN method, and authorize.net AIM API so this is in-line with all of our current acceptance methods. I guess if you don't use paypal IPN then this creates a lot of extra work for you. If you are at some point able to integrate everything to your own system, then it will probably work much more efficiently. There are definitely some issues with it overall, but I personally think it is off to a very good start.
Google Checkout is now free, even if it sucks free is better than caughing up 3% to paypal, all the fees with these services are getting crazy? On large payments it's a bit rediculous. I'll still use google checkout whenever I can. also, I think you can setup a shipping solution, let me look into checkout for a little bit, i'll get back to you.
We calculate everything in our system and send the customer to the GCO page with a total, and the item number as the item description, and that's it. We've been using a fixed cost / item for a while, but if you calculate everything first, you should be able to use any shipping calculation you want.
It's been nothing but great for us. If you can handle the XML integration it is a breeze, and far easier to track/rescind/etc. In only two weeks after implementation Google checkout is how about 50% of our sales are made. Add in the merchant account savings and that's a sudden profit jump that is hard to ignore (imagine adding 2-3% to your net profit on half your sales to imagine the jump). Even before google checkout came along only about 5% used paypal; after GCO was introduced that's fallen to about 2%. Most of our clients didn't like having to create an entirely seperate paypal account. For some reason they don't care about doing the same for google.
I just came across this article, Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory. Just a success story using Google Checkout.
I have to agree with windmaster, though. Compared with Paypal google checkout is overbearing and difficult (actually impossible) to impliment for my company. For a newbie with one product and free shipping it is a breeze.
I don't know if that's true necessarily, in that we move relatively quite a bit of product every single day (mid to high 5 digits). It took about a weekend's worth of work to integrate but after that we have literally no complaint with it, especially as compared with the previous merchant account/paypal jiggery pokery. Since it all comes in an easily understood XML structure we've actually automated fulfillment and shipping for GCO orders; this is especially handy given the multiplicity of suppliers we deal with. There probably are issues with shipping, given that we offer free shipping, but we haven't had to deal with them yet. I do know that the current setup is pretty flexible for merchant processing, approval, and fulfillment though.
This looks like it will violate their terms if you want to calculate the shipping based on zip code. Bummer. Here is a quote from them: c. Do not ask for zip codes prior to Google Checkout checkout unless necessary You may require buyers to provide their zip codes prior to Google Checkout checkout only if required to determine whether you can fulfill an order. (Example: You may require a zip code prior to checkout to ensure an item is in stock for a buyer’s geographic location.) You may not ask for zip code information prior to checkout for any other reason.
If you read their terms and conditions it looks like they want to play m$soft and create a monopoly position. http://checkout.google.com/seller/policies.html You can't calculate the shipping costs before passing the customer to Google. This is a killer for me. You can't offer google checkout as an option to other payment methods except your own 'checkout' button. You even can't take or offer coupons before passing them to google.
I have to agree, with the large fee's of paypal, Google is the only other option that is decent and fairly easy to use. I use Google at every chance I can. No fee's and the service and customer support is awesome.