Google checkout & online payments.

Processing online paymentsI have to thank Matt for pointing out to me last week that Google Checkout has now been opened up in the UK, this certainly appeals to me as I have a lot of small payments processed at present by Worldpay & Paypal. In fact most weeks I spend £70 on processing charges just for Worldpay.

For that reason the news the Google checkout has launched is of interest to me and they have dangled quite the carrot.

“From November 8, 2006 through December 31, 2007, we’ll process your Checkout transactions for free”

After December the standard fees will apply 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction however if your an Adwords advertiser then for every £1 spent on Adwords you can process £10 in sales for free.

Paypal Business account fees are approx 2.5% if you sell between £1.5k and £5k per month and 2.9% if you sell less than £1500 per month, Worldpay are a fortune compared to both.

Worldpay
My fees this week just for Worldpay

I have worked with quite a few companies for processing cards and they all have their own strengths & weaknesses.

Paypal : Easy to integrate but often confuse non web savy people at checkout & awful support in my experience.

Worldpay : Great support, very easy to integrate but are very expensive especially when processing lots of low value transactions.

Protx: (Now owned by SAGE) Can be tricky to setup and incurs monthly fees instead of transaction fees.

Google certainly have quite a list of products that they will not support checkout for and at present they don’t allow repeat billing for subscriptions which is a pain. Still they could save me over £2000/$4000 between now and the end of the year if I switched.

I have long since wanted to move away from Worldpay as their fees are high however the amount of subscriptions I have with them mean they will always be part of my income, I had thought about moving all new business across to paypal but to be honest paypal’s support is horrendous and I could never trust them to manage thousands of pounds of my money, I only offer paypal as an option as some people demand it.

I would be tempted by Google checkout if they can show signs on the horizon of offering subscription/repeat billing, I’d also like to see other options like a set monthly fee for unlimited transactions, paying £0.15 per transaction when your selling lots of low value items say £5 soon adds up over a month. Perhaps in time Google will no doubt offer a debit card to withdraw funds from an ATM.

Paypal killer? I think not but it is good to have more competition & options and free processing for 2007 is a fantastic hook, it almost makes me want to start offering consultancy to all those backwards UK companies.

Good day, I specialise in electronic payment fee reduction and I can guarantee to slash your processing fees this year! I can cut at least 75 % off your online card processing fees and all I ask is a one time administration charge of £250.

Sounds like a good business plan for one of those long copy sales pages 😉

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Great tips! I’d definitely be one of the first to try out Google Checkout.

  2. Scott,
    do you have any information about whether or not you can process subscriptions via Google Checkout, like PayPal?

  3. You can process subscription payments but they will not auto renew or repeat bill so you would need to manually process subscriptions which doesn’t work for me Justin, I think that would be one feature high up on my wish list.

  4. Well I guess that sort of defeats the purpose of creating subscriptions then, doesn’t it? The whole reason I use them with PayPal is so that I don’t have to create a renewal invoice. Oh well, I’m sure Google will implement it soon!!

  5. Great to see an alternative to shoddy Paypal. My site (and many others) sell low value items so a reduction in % per transaction is nice to see. Still, I was forced to go with a local bank to avoid paying fees out my arse

  6. Yeah … it sounds great , especially with that little bonus they offer until 2008 (” And until 2008, you can process all your Checkout orders for FREE. “). But, as my luck sometimes is, its only available to US and UK , and that somehow limits the point of using it for now. Hopefully they will make it available for everyone else too.

  7. Do you mean for registering as a webmaster MuZumbu, they do accepts payments from all over the world

  8. Yeah … I stand corrected … only for webmasters its restricted to US and UK. To buy using google checkout can be used from all over the world. But, since I’m from Romania I can’t use it. And neither PayPal. Just my luck.

  9. Hello Scott,

    Interesting idea on consultancy - I already offer SEO through http://www.haloSEO.com. How would you go about doing this…?

    Many thanks and I would like to also congratulate you on your many successes online!

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