Darryl Lyons’ Blog

Google have released their online payment service Google Checkout. Google are pushing three main areas:

Stop creating multiple accounts and passwords.
With Google Checkoutâ„¢ you can quickly and easily buy from stores across the web and track all your orders and shipping in one place.

Shop with confidence.
Our fraud protection policy covers you against unauthorized purchases made through Google Checkout, and we don’t share your purchase history or full credit card number with sellers.

Control commercial spam.
You can keep your email address confidential, and easily turn off unwanted emails from stores where you use Google Checkout.

As expected, Google have integrated the service into AdWords. This means that merchants who support Google Checkout are shown with a green shopping trolley next to their URL in advertising. Google are also adding incentives for those who pay for advertising with Google. That certainly is a major point-of-difference with Paypal.

Process sales for free.
For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free. For sales that exceed this amount or if you don’t use AdWords, you can process them at a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction.

The previously reported free period during beta was obviously untrue. For people who do not spend money on AdWords, the fees are 2% and $0.20 USD per transaction. That certainly beats Paypal’s fees of 2.9% and $0.30 USD per transaction.

There are already a number of well-known online stores using Google Checkout.

Forbes is currently carrying a story about the impending launch of GBuy, Google’s potential PayPal killer.

They have also come up with a sure-fire way to ensure that they will get a massive sign up rate.

During the beta phase, Google will not charge merchants for its payment service.

Interesting times ahead if all of this is true! Will the service cut into PayPal’s market dominance? I think it will if they can offer a slicker service, and more importantly, a smaller commission.

The blog statistics product I have been using since December 2005 has been acquired by Google. Measure Map, still in alpha, is a very easy to setup and use system, and I have been more than impressed by it over the last couple of months.

Jeffery Veen, from the Measure Map team and Adaptive Path, had this to say on the Google Blog.

Bringing Measure Map to Google is an exciting validation of the user experience work I’ve been doing with my partners at Adaptive Path for years. By opening up the app to more bloggers through Google, we hope to help even more people become passionate about their blogs.