Today, News.com post the news about a protest happening in the Boston. “Google is hosting a party at the eBay Live customer event in Boston on Thursday night for eBay sellers who are angry that eBay has forbidden merchants from offering Google Checkout as an online payment option.”

The “Let Freedom Ring” Google party seem already have more than 300 sellers sharing their painful experience about eBay. As eBay seller myself. I don’t really like what eBay is charging and the fee on Paypal. Currently, Google checkout charges no fee for seller until 2008 (Read here). I was not a google checkout fan since day one. With their no-fee checkout process, many sellers like me will want to give it a try. Especially, for most online retailers like me, who owns and operates their own online shopping e-commerce web site, will not want to pay for any fee for transactions. So Google is checking out eBay. Who is the winner?

I have test the Google Checkout since day one. Integrating into existing shopping cart have been painful experience, but it’s just one time deal. Once your shopping cart is done, all you have to do is wait and start using it to process your transaction. Good thing to use Google checkout is that your product listed on Google Product database (Froggle) will be indexed faster. It also allows you to have a Google CheckOut icon next to your items listed on Google product database. So people search Google can purchase your products right from there. There is no hassle to login to multiple locations like PayPal, eBay, your payment gateway and your own shopping cart site. It’s all done at one place.

Now sellers will have more time to do customer services, make sure items are shipped out on-time and will have more time to manage their more critical operation - Inventory. It’s a good services for seller.

What about the buyer? According to the instruction on Google CheckOut, it stores your credit card information privately. The seller will never know buyer’s credit card information. I have not making any purchase yet. I am a little bit uncomfortable since Google indexed pretty much everything. It’s possible that they also index your shopping behavior and shopping history for “AdSense” and “AdWord” purposes.

One thing I don’t think seller can do is to charge subscription fee to my customer. There is no recursive billing built-in like PayPal does. So I will have to use Paypal or other services like 2CO (2Checkout), which can do most of that for you automatically.

So who is the winner? Google, in my opinion. Google have made huge profit on their advertisement. All search engines do the same thing. However, most of people I know, doing online marketing or blogging, are hating the profit brought in from Google AdSense. Few people I met on the Internet are complaining that only 10% or less ad profit are from Google AdSense. It’s more difficult to earn $$ on AdSense without the risk to lose it. A lot of people including myself have once been rejected by Google due to unclear reasons.

With Google CheckOut, Google can easily collect the most important data that Wal-Mart have been collecting for a long time. Customer shopping behavior and history. Now Google also knows where those purchase were made and what web sites are more Google friendly. So more ads are coming after that. More profits are coming after that as well.

Google is the winner again.

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