No Need to Checkout GoogleCheckout

PayPal is a wonderful thing in that it allows me, a website owner, to easily collect payments w/o a merchant account. Even so, there are times when I’ve sought an alternative. It’s not often, but occasionally, PayPal goes down and online sales begin to suffer.

So, I was very pleased to find out about Google Checkout, another way to collect money online. After reading through the documentation and beginning to implement a simple payment system I was stopped dead in my tracks by some egregious flaws.

1) Users must already have, or create, a Google account

There is a non-trivial percentage of customers that are going to walk when they see that, and I’m not sure that I blame them.

2) The setup process is somewhat involved

If you require real-time online payment processing, the Google setup may be somewhat more complex than PayPal. To use the equivalent of Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) in GoogleCheckout, you have to first send Google information about what the user is wanting to purchase. Whereas using PayPal, you simply let PayPal notify your server-side script as to what was purchased.

After you inform Google what the person is purchasing, you then forward the person to GoogleCheckout and wait for Google to notify you about the transaction. Here’s where it gets bad. When Google notifies you, they force you to be notified over SSL using a valid certificate from a Certificate Authority. That’s going to cost some money, especially if you have a load balanced configuration with multiple servers processing payments. No thanks Google—I’ll stick with PayPal.

3) GoogleCheckout does not allow the purchaser to be redirected to a URL after the purchase is completed

This is a MUST. When a user purchases something online, they want to immediately gain access to it. There has to be a way to send that user back to a custom URL after purchase—BUT GoogleCheckout doesn’t provide this.

So, you see, don’t be fooled by Google’s tempting $0 fees until 2008. The truth is that Google Checkout is not ready for primetime, unless perhaps you are selling tangibles.