Google checkout popularity vs PayPal?

Hi All,

What’s everyone’s experience offering Google Checkout as a payment method on their website? How does it compare to PayPal and direct credit card payments in terms of customer use?

My site currently gets about 50% PayPal, 50% direct credit cards. How do your figures compare to this with Google Checkout included?

Thanks in advance!

I’ve seen more sites adding Google Checkout but have yet to find many who could measure a significant enough rise in sales to really be impressive. What I have seen is good results in Adwords listings when only one or two sites on a particular keyword uses checkout and therefore appear featured with the checkout payment button.

you mean the google badge

In our experience with one of our ecommerce clients who offered just paypal and google checkout, only about 8% of customers used Google’s button.

conclusions can’t be drawn based on single case scenario’s. There are a lot of variables in place such as i.e. where and how the site is being advertised. Obviously the Google Product Search users are more likely to use GC, compared to sites who may engage in offline advertising.

To the best of my knowledge Google Checkout is still only available in a few countries and doesn’t offer any of the back end processing options that Paypal offers.

That would limit it to sites selling physical goods in specific countries.

In order to be more competitive what GC NEEDS to do is release a form of API which allows store owners to process cc’s directly on the checkout payment page after gathering user info on the store (after create account) - without sending them off to Google. Due to their current policy you are not allowed to gather any user information prior to presenting the GC button.

What I found a bit weak about GC was a, incompatibility issues with custom shipping modules / options and b, a range of technical integration issues i.e. coupon code redemption, caused by their policy stated above.