Hey, I have been considering adding the google checkout option to my site. I was wondering how much use it has gotten on peoples sites that have other options like paypal and standard merchant accounts since they dropped their save "$xx when you..."promotions after Christmas. Anyone have percentage comparisons? I expected to see a lot more sites add it as an option. I know it is a very difficult setup option and would really like to hear peoples experience with it in 2007 before I spend a lot of setup time. Thanks! Turbo
Good question I haven't used checkout but I would also like to know what are people are saying about it. although its kinda getting scary all the information Google is collecting about you...
Everytime Google releases a new product, people (specially webmasters) jumps over it and include them everywhere. Why hasn't this happened to Google Checkout?
Ok, so hardly anyone here uses google checkout? why? Got to be some good reasons considering it would save you 2-3.5% per transaction till the end of the year. A. Too much power in googles hands? B. Difficulty of implementation? C. No-one would use it? D. Change is hard?
I use Google checkout on my site. I think it is not so widely used right now due to implementation. My partner and I think it is superior over PayPal because of the API and the control it gives us over the entire transaction process. I must note that my partner and I are both programmers and he wrote most of the Google Checkout code. One big hangup for most people is that a lot of people who host in a shared environment don't have the ability to set certain authentication settings on the web server. I have my own co-located server so this wasn't a problem for us. I think Google checkout will become more widely used as people develop more pre-packed code to help implement the process.
I think the simple reason is that most people are just used to Yahoo and PayPal, and that there's better backoffice/packaged support for these products.
mjamesb, How does it work for you? Do you give your users a choice of payment method at checkout? What do most choose? Thanks!
I am yet to use google checkout, at the moment I am still using paypal. However as with most of google ventures, I think they could well get big on this one! I would be happy to test it out sometime. If they introduced cheaper fees than paypal, I think paypal would certainly face some competition.
Google checkout only lets you sell physical goods that you ship to the customer. (If you are non-profit you can sell downloads). I think this is hampering some of the adoption and also the fact (unless it has changed) that ebay doesn't allow you to pay for auctions with Google Checkout.
If anybody uses a real merchant account in checkout (not paypal) can they give us a ratio like 90% merchant and 10% Google checkout? I'm considering adding it if people use it at all.
Integrating your site with checkout can be a real task. The sample code they give you is horribly bloated. I ended up writing my own code from scratch and it worked out fine and wasn't very many lines. As far as usuage, no numbers at this time. However, PayPal is not well liked and so if you give people another option, they'll probably use it. Because Google is so well known, users are probably more likely to submit payments through Google than through PayPal if they don't have an account with either.
I actually think Google checkout is a good idea, but I don't think they market it properly. Paypal has been a rip-off since they started and they take too much for themselves. Plus, it's too easy for the buyer to get his or her money back. I love having the merchant account where the money goes right into my checking account Someday I will consider Google Checkout.
With the regular merchant it is just as easy for the consumer to get their money back.. Half the time they can lie and still get it back.... I wonder how it is with google checkout. So far it doesn't really seem like its worth that hassle of adding it if people don't really use it. I would be great to save that percentage but I think the reason people used it late last year so much were those "save x $" promotions they did that were so good.
It's not that easy for the customer to get their money back (with a regular account), unless it's legit. You'll simply get a chargeback form in the mail with there statement, then you respond with yours. The customer always will have the upperhand but with Paypal it's ridiculous. I do alot of shopping online and I like to give small sites my business. As a customer when I see a store that only uses Paypal, I "think" 2 things: 1) Store owner is too cheap to pay the 300 dollars or so to set-up 2) The store owner has bad or no credit and was denied Now I know this probably isn't true most of the time, but what other explanation could there be?
I hope google checkout starts to dominate more...coz paypal is just cocky and horrible . still waiting for it to go international...
I don't use it on my sites, but I've used it quite a bit as a customer. (Especially when they had that 20 off 50 promotion going). From a seller's perspective, you gotta love the no fees for the rest of the year bit..