Comments on: PayPal v Google(Buy), WSJ Reports

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:36:51 +0000

Gbuy is not a good service, I work for a company that offers Gbuy. They are very unreliable and there has been alot of bugs and other issue associated with Gbuy. Many orders do not transfer correctly and customers are sometimes charged for items that are not placed on there orders. Also they have no Gbuy customer service and do not allow retailers to give out any contact information.

By: Arturo

Arturo — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:14:54 +0000

as more information assets are transacted on the network, payment systems like bitpass will become more important.
http://corp.bitpass.com/marketplace/index.html

paypal's integration with ebay and physical goods retailers is extensive. google would be smart to enable micro-payments to video, music and software.

By: DaveMc500Hats

DaveMc500Hats — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 03:52:32 +0000

They're a legitimate threat, but payments won't likely be conquered overnight by Google. They might be a significant competitor at some point, but i'd expect it will take a year or two to gain real traction. Even with big brains and a large existing customer base, it takes time to build a competitive online payment option and to handle the resultant fraud and customer service issues.

That said, there are certainly some areas where PayPal hasn't been innovating that could be oppportunities for Google. Digital goods would be a likely area that Paypal really hasn't solved very well, particularly noting Google's video store and other digital assets.

will be interesting to watch how it plays out...

By: buygoogle

buygoogle — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:00:53 +0000

That's funny, I thought Google already had a pretty cool payments service. Didn't they quietly roll out nicely streamlined payments as part of Google Video?

Google Video validates the user's credit card and street address one time and stores the results in your Google Account. Subsequent purchases are handled with just two clicks - Buy and Confirm.

Feels like a payment service to me.

And when Google allows individuals to get paid for uploaded content, then we'll also have "person-to-person" payments, too.

But since it only works for content delivered through Google, it's not truly a PayPal competitor -- I can't email you a direct payment like I can through PayPal.

Can't you see this working for all kinds of electronic content? Like books, journal articles, stock market newsletters, DNA sequences and other "dark web" content that's currently locked up? As long as Google is making the market and delivering the content, this works nicely.

By: tom

tom — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 18:04:05 +0000

I had expected Google to run a payment service for quite a while. It makes a lot of sense for them. They already have every online retailer battling against each other for adsense placement and before too long, accepting payment via a 'google wallet' type system will become unavoidable. This will certainly shake up the payment processing/merchant account market (while I think is a good thing) and probably make buying online safer/easier but probably not cheaper for the consumer. Online stores will fight amongst themselves for premium placement on the google shopping network and the costs will be passed on to the consumers.

By: Charbax

Charbax — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:52:19 +0000

[url=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/06/1429254]slashdotted[/url]

Cool story!

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:26:01 +0000

If we are going to discuss encroaching on each others core business this story ( http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=39443&Nid=18224&p=308014 )blows the gWallet out of the water!!!

OK so an online publisher uses eBay to sell advertising space...been done on small scales before I guess. But if eBay builds a tool to manage all publishers who wish to auction of their online ad inventory...well I think there are more than a few AdSenser's who don't like sharing up to 70% of their revenue with Google.

By: William

William — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:13:47 +0000

gpay and paypal will always be one of many options that users will have to purchase an item. Neither will ever be more than this. If I m a retailer I would want to except payment from as many sources as possible. I would not want to lock into any option that would exclude a fairly large amount of consumers. Paypal accepts credit cards as well as debit cards, and you can also use your paypal account. If Gpay is to succeed it will have to at the least mimic all of the paypal options. Once this is done what could the possible points of differentiation be?

By: synergy

synergy — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:13:37 +0000

Re: 'But it makes one ask, "Just how big is Google's appeitite? Can they compete in so many different areas without exploding?'

Well, I trust Google a lot more than I trust the U.S. government and it is usually far more efficient at what it does.

By: jocko

jocko — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 15:41:27 +0000

This just goes to show that all internet businesses are under attack...all the time...Blogs have lowered the barrier to entry to the point where anyone can have a site where as years ago, it took a little bit of technical knowledge to manage content.