Comments on: Google Checkout: Blogosphere Fever and Top 10 Posts Roundup

By: Marc Mezzacca

Marc Mezzacca — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:09:01 +0000

Update guys- Tried Google checkout, read about it in this post.

By: Ja

Ja — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 05:35:52 +0000

I have to agree with Steve and point out further that their main business is advertising (which lots of the other services enhance in various ways) but to most it’s just a search box. However, I think if they don’t start improving their search engine, they may find themselves ousted from that spot eventually and have no legitimate business for very long anymore. Hence all the scrambling trying to hook into actual ways to make money.

I think Google Checkout is just part of a plan and isn’t necessarily aimed at Paypal or any other such service. They may start integrating it with their advertisement payments first and then come up with something like an auction or payment based service it needs to be exclusive to. If people need to use it for things like on demand google video or any exclusive service that they can generate enough interest in, they may be able to garner users. So basically I just see it as a step towards more internal revenue generating ventures.

ps. I don’t really care one way or another… too bad that always occurs to me after I write comments.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:33:49 +0000

have you noticed the trend? everything that Google does is hyped so much and predicted to be a killer of this and that. In reality, it turns out that Google mostly fails to gain ground in everything they do except for search. It’s a one trick company (although a good one)

The outcome of this will be that PayPal will become even better and Yahoo and probably MSN will try to follow Google and incorporate payments into thier search. Yahoo already signed up with PayPal and I doubt that MSN will try to develop payment system (they are much more likely to use dominant PayPal). In terms of market share, Yahoo search MSN search is just a little bit under Google. But if Yahoo incorporates PayPal into their search, I see this as a very good reason for millions of loyal PayPal users give preference to Yahoo search. I will defenetly switch back to Yahoo search from Google if I can see there who accepts PayPal.

As for me, I checked out Google checkout and since I am a rather heavy PayPal user, I absolutely see nothing atractive about Google payments. PayPal is incomparably more complete solution and is accepted at over 150K merchants off ebay and several millions on ebay. Google has what? mere 100.

On a conceptual level, Google plans seem big and encompassing, but that does not translate into killing everyone everywhere – like I said above Google mostly failed to be known to average guy as something more than just a searchbox.