Having choices in great! When there’s competition between companies, consumers will always benefit by getting better and cheaper products. Cell phone plans keep getting more affordable, number of minutes keep increasing. Take Sprint for example — they recently launched “Any Mobile, Anytime” plan where you can call any cell phone in U.S. and talk for as long as you want without using any of your plan minutes. A couple of years ago you would pay hundreds of dollars for a plan like that, and today it is available for, I believe, under $50/month.
This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.
Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.
Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.
Hi Pavel – I use Google Checkout for almost everything these days and really like the way I can invoice a client then get the payment go direct into my UK Bank Account.
This was pretty much the icing on the cake for me as far as Google are concerned.
Love it
David