No More Free Checkout from Google

Until now, Google Checkout merchants who advertise on Google’s Adwords platform, have received credit for use toward Google Checkout fees they incur. However, due to Google tightening financials, Google Checkout is no longer free or even reduced for Adwords users. Un-Google like, they didn’t even notify current Google Checkout users prior to dumping the Adwords credit system in December. By doing this, all of the December holiday Google Checkout sales paid fees for the service.

Now, the question in the near future is whether Google Checkout can really stand on it’s own.

Google claims that there are enough consumers using and preferring Google Checkout, the system no longer needs to operate as a loss leader to function.

“Why have it as a loss leader if it’s doing OK?” he said. “We saw very healthy results after we decided to charge for the service.”

I think that Google Checkout is going to have a tough time keeping support without offering incentives for retailers to use it. We saw a massive drop when they stopped giving consumers incentives to use it. It simply doesn’t have the consumer support to make it sustainable for the merchants using it. In the past six months or so there’s been speculation of Google dropping the Google Checkout program. This may simply be Google way of letting the program die, especially since this change was never properly announced.

With Paypal stronger than ever and the emergence of Amazon’s payment service, Google Checkout will most likely need to find some new way to garner additional support, or be lost in the history of internet failures.