{"id":316,"date":"2008-01-15T14:49:05","date_gmt":"2008-01-15T19:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merchantaccountblog.com\/archives\/316"},"modified":"2008-01-15T14:51:43","modified_gmt":"2008-01-15T19:51:43","slug":"revisiting-google-checkout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/316\/revisiting-google-checkout","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting Google Checkout"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Checkout is about to end their free processing<\/a>, and switch to a traditional 2% + $.20 \/ transaction structure. Businesses who advertise on Google’s Adwords platform can still get major discounts on GCO processing.<\/p>\n

I have blogged about GCO<\/a> in the past, on more than one occasion<\/a>, and I have held mixed feelings about it in several areas. We’ve now been using it for about a year and a half, and it is now becoming clear where Google Checkout it headed, nowhere<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Initially, Google gave coupons and incentives to consumers and business owners. These helped push GCO usage past Paypal for a short period of time, but now that the incentives are gone, GCO is going with them. For us GCO topped at about 10% of all online purchases, but has since dropped to about 1.2 – 1.5% (“Generous estimate!”)<\/em>. Paypal has slowly, but steadily increased all the while.<\/p>\n

Despite the difficulty in integrating GCO with a website, I still think that it is an excellent alternative payment method, assuming that there are still going to be people who want to use it. From a shoppers perspective, one you have a GCO account, it is much faster than paying with a credit card or paypal, but there has never been a solid reason to use it. As we all know, it is consumers that drive services, and not businesses. I think that unless Google finds a way to make many more shoppers want to pay with GCO, there is never going to be a wide adoption of it. Paypal was driven by eBay until it was big enough to stand on it’s own. Google needs it’s own eBay to really make GCO popular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google Checkout is about to end their free processing, and switch to a traditional 2% + $.20 \/ transaction structure. Businesses who advertise on Google’s Adwords platform can still get major discounts on GCO processing. I have blogged about GCO in the past, on more than one occasion, and I have held mixed feelings about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3rd-party-processors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}