Paypal vs Google Checkout online payment systems

Update: see my post Paypal vs Google Checkout online payment systems – Part II

As I mentioned on my About page, I’m in the process of starting a website(more on the nature of the website later). One of the things I need to do is to set up online payment for my customers. I considered handling credit card transactions myself but that simply has too many security implications. Instead, I’m looking into PayPal and Google Checkout. It’s best to leave online payment processing to the specialists.

One thing that would be really nice for my website to have is some kind of shopping cart/checkout feature which would allow me to streamline the payment process nicely. However, Google Checkout requires you to work with a 3rd party e-commerce partner to enable the checkout feature. The shopping cart is a nice-to-have feature but my website doesn’t really need that for now and so I’ve decided to simply use the “Buy now” feature offered by both companies. After opening a company bank account last Friday, I opened a merchant account at both PayPal and Google Checkout. A few things that Google Checkout requires that PayPal doesn’t are the EIN of my company, the Refund and Cancellation policy, and the Shipping policy. Other than the EIN, I didn’t have any of the other things available and so I had to write something up real quick. Other than that, the experience has been as smooth as silk and I’m just waiting for them to link up with my bank so I can start integrating the services with my website. My website won’t be operational until early next year and so I won’t be able to take advantage of the usage-fee waiver that is currently offered by Google for transactions made until the end of the year 🙂 However, it’s still nice to have someone else do the hard work of handling payments while I can focus on the core things that I want to offer through my website. Thank you PayPal and Google!

btw, YourMinis is simply awesome!

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