Forum Moderators: goodroi
Apparently more information is available on the Wall Street Journal site. Anyone a subscriber there and can thus provide more information?
I refuse to be forced to join WSJ Online (even if a free trial) simply to read one article which may or may not be valuable. One of my pet gripes is when someone gives a reference to a story or link but you need to join by completing an application or pay to read the news report. NY Times, WSJ and others are well known for that. It's best if only non-membership required sites are referenced to read articles.
Hopefully Google does micropayments. What I would like to see is 20% vig to Google with 0 cents per transaction.
I'd pay that, no problem.
One would think that between their massive network and their PhDs they could actually make it happen.
Working micropayments *will* change everything.
I agree tho, google can make this work, and I bet it would be pretty sweet. They're not known for their UE, but functionality they have always been stronger with. Just give me an API and I'll be happy :)
Chip-
By KEVIN J. DELANEY and MYLENE MANGALINDAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 18, 2005 8:54 p.m.
Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter.
Exact details of the search company's planned service are not known. But the knowledgeable people say it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts. Some consumers like PayPal for the security it offers, since it allows them to share their banking or credit-card numbers only with PayPal without having to divulge the information to merchants....
[edited by: Chris_R at 3:32 am (utc) on June 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Had to snip to four sentences per TOS on copyright [/edit]
[online.wsj.com...]
Thank you google.
For years of operation, PayPal is still not accepting many countries. Google has enough experience dealing with international clients(AdWords and AdSense). If they do that, there won't be any competition and they'll once again be the king.
Look at all the prior payment services that have failed. With 2.51 billion in cash, name recognition, and good people; google can make their payment service a success.
eBay & PayPal are a natural tie in - not sure what Google will be able to do to drive the volume. But they don't need to. Guess google will be buying a bank soon.
Maybe offer some tie in with their adwords merchants/tracking or Gmail service.
PayPal has the first mover advantage, but more people in this field would be more than welcome.
I am in that area (online payments) for more than 10 years now and some of you know, that my main site is especially on that topic.
Just to give you an idea, what they are up to:
1.) handling of money is very country specific, eg. if you handle money for other people in Germany as a trustee, we have a special law for that. So if they want to offer global payment services, they will need country specific professionals and international banking experts.
2.) Banking and transaction networks have certain requirements in failure safety. If they do not comply to that, no major bank will work with them. Especially the swiss are a bit picky with that.
They have the marketing power to introduce such a service, but still: people need to fund their accounts. They will need to precharge their accounts and only if they precharge with more than 10 USD it makes sense. And why should I give Google 10 bucks upfront for payments I will make in the next 10 weeks of some MP3s and 2 articles I want to read... heavy arguments!
I agree with you, that a working micropayment will change a lot, but I still wonder if people will widely accept a fancy search engine as their trustee for money? Maybe it is time for a new brand? "goocoin"?
2 pennies,
P!
Search on Google and you'll find many nightmarish tales about Paypal. I think once Google gets in this market, Paypal will have to really start innovating if they have to survive, given Google's reach and quality. Whatever has come from Google even apart from search, including news, Adsense has been a quality service. No reason why the payment service will be any different.
They should look at India as a major market, a year or two down the line for a service like this. Indian webmasters have few options and business from India is growing at a fast pace. Every urban home in India will soon have an Internet connection. It'll be like the air we breathe, everywhere and free! The Indian economic boom is just beginning. The market will expand rapidly. Paypal took a lot of time to be India friendly. Till as recently as 2 months ago India was in the list of countries where money couldn't be withdrawn to. One could only spend money by sending it to other paypal users.
I can already imagine the 419 Nigerian Scam emails stating: "Update your GoogPay account..." I had lot of clients that refused to make payments with Paypal, because they didn't consider it safe, or were scared by the email and other scams.
I can also imagine future posts in GoogPay forum in this site, "Hey dude, they frozed my account", similar to the ones we hear often in Adsense forum. Sorry for the pessimistic point of view, but I feel that way today :p.
Finally, I agree with other points of view expressed here, there is nothing more regulated, and country specific than international finances, banking, etc.
Online payment business always brings so many troubles. Try to search any gateway's name plus "sucks".
G$'s most valueable capital is its brand, not its search engine tech or anything else.
Also, paypal is a very good and robust payment gateway. To beat paypal, G$'s payment system must be much better, which is not so easy.
Think about it - how many searches can they process before someone clicks on an adwords? Probably a lot. That's tonnes of processing they do for sometimes as little as a 30 cents.
On AdSense, sometimes even less.
OooOOOOooh. If they can make micropayments work.. now *that* will be an exciting world for all of us independent folk.
(Convincing someone to part with 50 cents is a pretty easy, and doesn't require a trustworthy brand... just a good taste of excitement)
For years of operation, PayPal is still not accepting many countries.
And there's a very good reason for this: in Europe NOBODY (well, ..) uses checks. You send money online from one bank account to another (normally at no charge), in most cases the money arrives within a day or two. Secure and fast.
Don't want to pay up front? Allow the merchant to collect the cash directly from your bank account. This transaction can be cancelled even weeks after the cash left your bank. Just tell your bank you want the money back - bingo, the next day it's back in your account.
I do quite some selling and buying on ebay. They started to show a "paypal accepted" for my auctions just because I have a paypal account - (I only use it to send money to the US). Someone chose to pay me through paypal because Ebay advertises this as a very safe way to send your money (the amount was about 5 US-$, so this extra safety was really needed ....) This customer had to register with paypal, then send the money to paypal by bank transfer (no credit card on hand) and then paypal informed me there's money in my account. Took over a week. The money is still sitting in my paypal account because I don't really know how to get it.
Read my lips: THIS WILL NEVER WORK IN EUROPE (Germany at least)
I really hope Google comes up with a nice micro-payment solution. Maybe something that waits until a certain threshold is reached (maybe 10 Dollars, before real money moves from the buyers account - to keep transaction costs low)
cant wait for this to turn up
This would open up new posibilities, can't wait for it to go online!
Plus as a search marketer I think that it would be kinda cool to accept payments via Google ;)
EquityMind
Just enter google when you go to
[sos-res.state.de.us...]
Why not?
PayPal works very well for me here. They send the money directly to my german bank account, as does any other reasonable company. Google actually does the same for my AdSense revenues, so they already have significant parts of the know-how and infrastructure for a payment processing service in place.
There will be a nice side benefit: One of the most requested features of AdSense and AdWords has always been the direct transfer of funds between the two. What would be a more natural way of doing this than plugging a general payment processing service in between? Hit how many flies with one stroke?
I don't think Google are suited to running something that needs to be rock solid, reliable and consistent. They'd be better off buying a company and re-branding it without touching anything.
Hey blaze, what are micropayments and what is a vig?[carguy84]
"Micropayments are a proposed means for generating revenue while providing online content. In the early days of the World Wide Web, content would usually be made available for free by organisations such as universities."
[[en.wikipedia.org ]]
"Vig" is an abbreviation of Vigorish, it means a commission (taken by the house or bookmaker).
