eBay: No Sale for Google Checkout

By Geoff Duncan Published July 7, 2006

Online auction giant eBay announced yesterday via its policy pages (login required) that it is not planning to support Google Checkout, an online payment service rolled out by the Internet search giant late last month. According to eBay, Google Checkout isn’t being supported because it has no track record: in eBay parlance, it is protecting the security of its customers and transactions by enabling payments only through tested and trusted services. Google Checkout joins a large number of online payments systems which eBay doesn’t support, including Netpay, Nochex, BillPay, e-gold, FastCash.com, and many others.

At present, Google Checkout is not setting itself up as a consumer service; instead, Google Checkout is aiming mainly at small businesses, with eyes toward large online enterprises in the future. Right now, Google Checkout only enables payments to be sent to parties with confirmed merchant accounts.

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Nonetheless, Google Checkout might be appealing to some of eBay’s big sellers, and to folks running businesses via eBay auctions. The Google brand name carries some credibility with the online buying audience, but (perhaps more importantly) processing payments with Google Checkout would be cheaper than eBay’s own PayPal service. If you’re conducting a large number of auctions, reducing your transaction overhead translates directly to your bottom line.

eBay may re-evaluate Google Checkout in the future, but right now, it basically looks like the king of online auctions doesn’t want the king of online search (and advertising) horning in on its auction revenue.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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