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29 June 2006

Another week, another Google product launch. This time it’s Google Checkout – and fairly obviously it’s a play for the Pay Pal / online payment processing space.

As far as checkout process’ go, it’s seems to be a fairly good one; the simplicity of Google’s house style really works for a checkout system, and the unification of your payment history and tracking across multiple sites are pretty good features. The integration with adwords is a nice bonus as well – Google is really at it’s best when it’s leveraging it’s core business (advertising).

The stumbling block is however, whether you trust Google any more.

To pay for something using Google Checkout requires that you have a Google account – which is a big stumbling block for anyone who just wants to use it as a payment processor only. It also means that Google then knows what your purchase history is, and hence could – in theory – use it to target ads at you. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing – I’d prefer better ads is I have to have ads – and while they claim they don’t do the whole “evil” thing, does anyone believe it any more?

It’s quite funny really – their are a lot of nasty stories floating around about PayPal, and a lot of people consider them an “evil” company, but is Google really any better?

Who would have said that 2 years ago?

From: Articles

29 June 2006