I've always used mals-e.com for my shopping cart solutions and I generally couple that with a PayPal account for credit card processing. Has anyone had either a really good or really bad experience with Google Checkout?
We've been using them since they opened. It's a good service, but like Paypal, I wouldn't ever recommend using them exclusively. There's definitely benefit to offer them as a supplemental payment method. They're especially good if you do AdWords advertising, because your GCO processing can be completely free. Here's a review I wrote when they first got going: http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/archives/186 In any case I recommend offering at least credit card acceptance (not through paypal), and paypal, and it's best to offer them seperately. There's a good percentage of shoppers that will not use paypal under any circumstance. There's also a good percentage of shoppers that only want to use paypal.
Go back one page and read all the "Paypal sucks" posts, which probably account for 1/3 of all of them in the payment processing forum. It's equally bad on the buyer's side from people who have been burned by bad paypal sellers.
Google checkout is okay. To implement it on your website is a pain in the butt. It isn't as easy as Paypal. Google checkout also has very few users compared to paypal.
Google Checkout also has some strange restrictions regarding different countries. For example, in the UK you can use it to pay easily enough, but if you want to use it to collect you have to be a VAT-registered company.
In my experience Google checkout will block larger transaction sizes even if the credit card has it easily covered. Not sure where the cutoff is, but when I tried to use it for a $1795 retail product the transactions would not go through.