PayPal Vs Google Checkout

You may have noticed recently that Google now offers a checkout system. If so, you are probably wondering what's wrong with just using PayPal. I will explain some of the differences and similarities each of these checkout systems have for both the sellers and buyers.

Sellers

PayPal charges 1.9-2.9% of the sale and $0.30 per transaction. Google Checkout charges 2% and $0.20 per transaction. They currently offer free transactions until December 31, 2007. After that, if you spend $1 on AdWords, you can process $10 of checkout sales with no charge.

PayPal allows you to use your credit card, debit card or bank account whereas Google Checkout only allows you to use a credit card or debit card. Google Checkout is also currently limited to the U.S. and PayPal supports 55 countries and 6 currencies.

PayPal currently has around 143 million customers, while Google Checkout is still working on getting off its feet. This means that chances are, new customers on your website will likely need to sign up for Google Checkout, which may hurt your conversion rates.

Google also recently released Google Base, previously named Froogle, which you can list products on. This is comparable to eBay, which is owned by the same company as PayPal. Base offers free listings, which is very nice if you are interested in listing a lot of items. If you advertise on eBay that you support Google Checkout, you risk being banned.

Buyers

Google Checkout's signup is pretty comparable to PayPal if you do not have a Gmail account. If you have a Gmail account, it is easier. The Google Checkout process also goes much quicker than PayPal and has fewer hassles. Google's fraud protection is also better, if you catch it in 60 days. PayPal protects anything over $50, whereas Google protects any purchase. Security-wise, both Google Checkout and PayPal use SSL. This means that your transaction will be encrypted and secure. Google checkout also hides your email address from the seller, and randomly generates an email address to give to the seller. It generally looks something like: john-sfm431srfdc@checkout.l.google.com. This does allow sellers to still contact you. One other limitation Google Checkout currently has is that they do not support peer-to-peer transactions. This means you can't send your friend $50 for a present or something like that. Google also supports seller ratings, but PayPal only supports ratings on eBay. This is only a portion of the sellers out there.