Forum Moderators: buckworks
Google has added a feature to Google Base that allows merchants to handle payments through a user's Google account. The feature effectively turns Google into an e-commerce platform for retail operators.
[vnunet.com...]
[edited by: engine at 3:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 28, 2006]
[edit reason] added link and story [/edit]
Wow - huge news and no discussion?
Uncertain market, off the beaten track for a search engine.
Look at the Stock price....
I think it's a matter of time, meaning that soon or later investors will find out the truth. Probably they figured out to say it little by little instead of letting people know the they announce earnings. This way they lose 10% now, 5% later and so on, and not 50% in one day.
"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – Google can't win. The search engine is often criticized for not giving Wall Street enough information. But when it does open up, investors often don't like what they hear."
[money.cnn.com...]
Anyway I didn't mean to drift the thread off topic.
The problem with this product is it's just a "me too" thing. There's no real buzz or news surrounding it, other than the fact that it's from Google. That's not enough to be news. There's nothing "new". It comes not out of innovation or clever ideas and thinking, but out of a need to expand into other markets for financial security.
I think it's a really bad move, and it's quite possible that Google are about to experience their first real flop.
The problem with this product is it's just a "me too" thing.
Or you could just view it as boring because it's part of a long progression. Just as Amazon kept adding more categories of things to sell, and each would make news because people still saw Amazon as a "book seller", even though they intended all along to sell pretty much everything eventually.
Eventually, Amazon got to the point where breadth of inventory was no issue and had to start getting serious about weeding out what didn't work and profiting from what did work. Google's still in the expansion phase and hasn't gotten to the weeding out phase yet :-).
So why don't you give us some names of some companies which offer them? Merchant accounts are too expensive or not available to a great many in these 4 groups. Paypal has serious problems with Buyer Protection and Seller Protection (for example there is no seller protection if a customer wants to send someone a gift (confirmed addreses only)), is only available in a limited number of countries and can't be used for high-risk products. Third party processors are generally quite expensive and have a nasty habit of going out of business owing their merchants a huge amount of money (often for violating Visa/MC rules).
It's not at all clear to what extent Google will help these 4 groups. What will Google do about buyer and seller fraud for example? Could someone clarify?
This stuff works because you have a network effect of buyers and sellers, which Google has in spades with its adwords people.
What Google needs to do, is go harshly to town on it's adwords customers, providing them every free service under the sun they can think of, and then selling them advertising in every single possible place in existence.
That's their strategy for success, and it's a good one, because the more places to advertise - the more advertisers will want to come on board. The more advertisers that come on board, the more people will want to sell advertising to Google.
Powerful network effect that no one can beat, not MSFT / eBay / Yahoo .. anyone.
How does Google base give people a place to advertise? It doesn't, it's for people who don't have products or a website to advertise. It just makes no sense. GBuy? How does that create new places to advertise? I mean .. really.
Google needs to switch its company motto to -
"Advertise effectively anytime anywhere"
(PS. Thread creep is happening here. This is about google base + payment options, not the current price of their stock.)
On the other hand, they'll have stiff competition from eBay, etc... But still... It'll be interesting to see how this develops.
It looks like Google thinks the WORLD is only the US and Western europe!
Will keep using Paypal
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[edited by: lorax at 9:34 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] removed email snippet [/edit]
