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Using Google Checkout as a Payment
Processor
New Kid On The Block Carving Out a Piece of
the Action
Paul Smithson - 23rd February 2009
Google Checkout is a great alternative to
PayPal. It works much the same way as PayPal, only the
entire process is much easier for buyers, because it only
requires a couple of clicks from customers, and customers don't
need an account with Google Checkout to be able to make
purchases easily. It is much more like a standard
merchant account than PayPal.
Checkout makes it very easy to design your
own buy now buttons for your site. Just fill out fields such as
price, size, and description, and then it generates the HTML
code that you can cut and paste onto your
website.
It's very easy to set this process up, and
it takes only about a minute to process each product's
button. Once you’ve generated the code, all you have to
do is paste the code for the button onto your page, and
customers can begin to purchase the
item.
One drawback to Google Checkout is the
current lack of scripts that support it - especially if you
intend to sell digital goods like eBooks. Most of the current
digital shopping cart scripts are set up to take PayPal. Some
of them also take other payment processors like 1ShoppingCart
or 2Checkout, but the majority of them don’t currently support
Google Checkout.
As it stands, a business has to review
orders as they come in, then charge and ship the order from the
Checkout site. Once the order has been charged, the money is
sent straight to the bank account you set up within your Google
Checkout account.
Customers are also able to leave feedback
about merchants, which means you need to be very careful to
keep your customers happy. If you get a lot of negative
feedback, or your rating drops, you may find it difficult to
persuade customers to buy from you.
Many people are moving to Google Checkout
as a result of PayPal's ever-increasing reputation for
restricting accounts, and holding money for long periods of
time when there is a dispute. Some people have even
reported having their PayPal accounts shut down with no prior
notice, leaving them with no way to take payments. These people
often claim PayPal shut down their accounts for no reason, and
wouldn’t reopen them even with adequate proof that nothing bad
took place, which is worrying if you’re relying on your payment
processor for your livelihood. Many of these displaced
merchants have chosen Google Checkout as their replacement
payment processor.
If you’re a Google AdWords user, which most
Internet marketers are, there’s a very special incentive for
you to use Google Checkout and that is that for every dollar
you spend on Google AdWords, you get $10 in free processing
from Google Checkout. For people who spend a decent
amount of money on AdWords, this could result in a massive
saving on your payment processing
costs.
About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.
For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site,
www.xsitepro.com. |
Source:
http://www.xsitepro.com/using-google-checkout-as-a-payment-processor.html
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