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Google Launches Checkout

Google has just announced Google Checkout, a service that provides a one stop shop for payment processing online.  The idea being that you sign up to checkout, then if you come across a site that accepts checkout you pay using the service.  I guess this means you don’t have to go and enter your credit card details in every website you buy from.  It’s similar to PayPal payment processing, which never really seemed to take off.  Google seems to have provided some management functionality for sellers and has some interesting adwords integration where a small Google checkout icon appears for merchants that accept it on their ads.

There appears to be three options for sellers, a simple “Buy Now” button, a pre created cart from partners (read web hosts and tool vendors) as well as an API.  I think the majority of users will be going with the API option, quite how versatile the API is, is yet to be seen.  What isn’t clear, is what’s available for consumers.  Will there be a centrally managed control panel that tracks things like previous purchases and order statuses?  I’m genuinely intrigued to see what sort of take up this service gets, its bound to be more popular than the PayPal solutions, purely because its google, whether its better, remains to be seen.

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Ten reasons why web applications aren’t the future

I posted a short while back on the ten reasons why web applications are the future, well this is a balance article that covers why, at the moment, theres still a whole host of obstacles to overcome. Read on…

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