I was recently asked by thestreet.com to provide my perspectives into the new Google Checkout Service.
After taking a look at a variety of different eCommerce sites that had Google checkout, it seems to be be a seamless integration within an existing platform infrastructure and provides a clean and user friendly transactional experience.
Google’s main effort here is to make the actual “purchasing” portion of the conversion funnel quicker and easier for consumers. The problem is that users must make an account with Google and input their credit card information within their system to get up and running. My perspective is that this additional step will cause a roadblock in penetration, at least initially, as consumers will be slow to adopt to the extra step.
Ebay is already defending their turf by banning Google Checkout within their site. Smart move as the Paypal unit generates a substantial amount of profits to the ebay enterprise and is the business that is most impacted by Google’s new offering.
Although Google’s solution is not a stored value system, it still is an alternative payments processing solution that stores credit card data. Very similar to the convenience offered by Paypal and their direct debit processing form a checking account.
Google’s carrot with adwords (every $10.00 spent on adwords gets $100.00 free processing within Google Checkout) should make more retailers take the time to integrate the payment alternative on their site. Now will consumers embrace it in the way Paypal was embraced? - only time will tell…
<a href=http://www.technorati.com/google+checkout rel=”tag”>Google Checkout</a>
Tags: eCommerce Usability