Quick Review of Google Checkout

[blitzen]

We've been using the Google Checkout for about 1.5 months and here is our opinion so far.

(1) Who uses Google Checkout.
We had less than about 1% of our customers choose Google Checkout. Most of our orders are high-dollar and those using G Checkout were the ones purchasing less than $50.
It appears those using G Checkout are purchasing the lower-priced items.

(2) Google's Customer Service
One chargeback was filed in the 6 weeks. That was pretty fast and wonder if this is odd or will we be getting many from this checkout.
The necessary documentation (delivery confirmation and email communique with the customer) was submitted right away.

To date, no response from Google was received concerning the chargeback.

Several emails were sent to Google asking the results of the chargeback.
To date (about a month later), none have been answered.

That's pretty poor especially when it concerns money.
Go to the Checkout Panel and there is no phone number to phone the Merchant Services Checkout department.
There is no email, form or otherwise, to contact them specifically for this type of problem.
The email form deals with getting you set up with Google Checkout. Once you're up and running, good luck contacting them and getting a reply.

When it comes to a merchant account, we expect to have contact information easily accessible.

We rate their customer service with an "F".

I hope that you have better luck with Google Checkout.

[arius]

We tried Google Checkout in two of our stores so far and as a payment method we are not too happy with it. OK, since we are adwords advertisers and we get Google Checkout dollars so finance charge so far has been zero. That is great, but here is my take on some other Google Checkout experiences we had so far:

1) Less than 3% of our customers chose to use Google Checkout (between two stores, one store being more than the other: so I guess you can say average 2-5%)

2) We have been very unhappy with the fact that there is no phone numbers on the orders. Unlike Google's own experience, people still use phones and online merchants still call customers when there is problem with an order, shipping address, item requested, any notes they might enter while placing an order

3) Lack of Phone number might not have been such a major problem if the customer email relay through Google worked. So far I don't think any (NO, NADA, ZILCH) of our emails to customers work when we need to contact them. We had some customers send us questions or order change requests (overall I think Google Checkout customers are more demanding then regular customers - might be the fact that they are early adapters causing this) but as a company we look bad when we seem to not customer questions (even though we do and they dont get it). Had incidents were customers upset for not being replied.

4) Again due to the fact that we dont have customer emails we can NOT send them promotions or remainders. Usually 90% of customers opt-in for this when they place order where as with Google Checkout this is less than 30%. Pretty big loss for us since in one business we make money from repeat business (not the first sale)..

Overall we are not so happy with Google Checkout either. Not only because they don't have a customer service department we can contact but also because they are causing us to provide not good enough service by cutting our ties with our own customers.

One good thing was the increase in CTR for our Adwords campaign of course. But the effect has not been that great. Also I think we get also more unqualified clicks. We ended up spending more to test Google Checkout CTR effect. So overall the increase in click through rate was balanced by increase in unqualified rate and drop in conversion rate.

[arius]

Also forgot another major issue.

5-) $10 cash back on the first order that they are offering to lure customers.

That is no good. You get a lot of freebie people that dont get the support and information from Google about their $10 OFF. (I think the the higher chargeback ratio might be due to this). They email the vendor about that , you don't know anything about that and plus your customer does not get your response about that questions, they get even more mad and end up cancelling. We got higher than average cancellation requests from Google Checkout orders.

[sub_kovert]

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