12/7/2006
Processing Credit Cards for Free
If you are selling stuff online, and it doesn’t involve a subscription product, you’re CRAZY not to use Google Checkout
Yesterday I got a phone call from my friend Lanny Morton because he was quoted in a story on the front page of the money section of the USA today (I know…he doesn’t really blog…I’ve been telling him he needs to for like a year now…). He had gotten a phone call from a reporter who said “What do you think about Google offering to process transactions for free through 2007?” to which he resonded “Uhhh…mmm…Are you f’ing kidding me?”. Lanny didn’t even know that Google was processing transactions for free…and he wrote an entry on the google checkout blog.
The reporter asked “Can I get a reaction from you?”. lol.
Apparently google didn’t make a very big announcement that they’re processing credit cards for free for people. Maybe google checkout isn’t taking off fast enough for them.
I think that in the future, there are a lot of merchant account companies who are really going to be hurting because of google checkout. If I can have google process my transactions so easily, why open up a merchant account. Google checkout is free…and right now it saves me 3%. I know…I could do this with paypal…but I’ve heard (and then had) bad experiences with paypal. Plus, there are a lot of people who don’t trust it. Most people trust google. Some people would die for google.
If they would process subscriptions correctly (without making the user click a link each month and go through the checkout process) I would use them for everything I do (which is mostly subscription products).
Filed under Search Engines by John
Comments on Processing Credit Cards for Free »
Dustin @ 5:03 pm
Yeah, that is my hangup with Google Checkout too - the fact that they don’t do subscriptions. I’m hoping they will do that in the future. Also, they don’t really have a way to send extra info to the single payment method last I looked - unless you want to use their API, then they require you to have an SSL certificate on your site. I’m sure I could be saving some money if I just took the time to recode my site to use it and purchased an SSL certificate, but it hasn’t been worth my time as of yet.
Utah Web Services @ 2:59 pm
So now Google handles transactions, I hope it Google checkout doesnt become a defacto checkout system. However, this is just a temporary offering if you ask me, they will eventually raise their processing fees. This is an introductory teaser to help popularize Google checkout but it wont last.