Checkout Wars Update..

Google Checkout is really pouring on the heat this Holiday season. 

1. They have launched an aggressive cash back to consumers promo with two flavors: $10 off $30 purchases and $20 off $50 purchases.
2. Free payment processing from now till the end of the year (how can you argue with that?!)
3. Launched a snazzy holiday portal
4. Has selectively used the "badge" on paid search to highlight the above with many partner companies (see example below):

Jason@WebProNews has some interesting data on the results of these efforts in the battle between PayPal and Google Checkout:

• Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott reports that the market share of visits to Checkout was up 158% in the days after Thanksgiving. But more impressive, PayPal suddenly isn't so far ahead.
• "While it still has a long way to go to catch Paypal in terms of visits, Paypal's lead was cut in half in just one week: last week I reported that Paypal's market share was 96X Google Checkout for the week ending 11/18/06 - this week Paypal was 38X Google Checkout in terms of market share."

It's not all sunshine though.  Recently, the Merc News ran a piece pointing out some consumer complaints and merchant complaints around GCheckout. Search guru John Battelle also put a scathing piece out about Gcheckout and privacy concerns.

My take - the privacy concerns are a tradeoff.  Would you rather be exposed to phishing and fraud by entering your credit card everywhere or would you rather trust google with it and protect it there?  The merchant and consumer concerns are growing pains.  Given the scale it's at now, Google checkout has gone through a TON of growth.  Whenever you go from 0 to 60mph, you are going to hit some bumps. Give Google time, they are serious about making gcheckout work. PLUS these speed bumps are nothing compared to what PayPal went through to get to the scale it's out.  That's the benefit of a 2.0 solution, you get to draft off the 1.0.  Remember Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel?

Comments

[gamegiants]

Is this for real Scott FREE Google Checkout until 2008 or it must be another hack on the Google Blogs..... If it is for resl all I have to say is WOW!

https://checkout.google.com/seller/freetransactions.html