Is Google Checkout the worst nightmare Amazon.com can face? I doubt it. Not today at least. Google checkout will be focused on merchants with volume, not the ebayers using PayPal.
So will it trounce Amazon.com because suddenly one zillion merchants searchable by Google’s vast technology can produce a better shopping experience with the same convenience and consumer protection as Amazon.com?
It remains to be seen. And it someone assumes Amazon.com is brain dead and asleep at the switch.
All we know for certain is that in 10 years, everything will be different.
For the home business, work at home book sellers Amazon is still an excellent place to sell books.
But here’s the other side.
Checkout is, however, a huge threat to Amazon.com. The biggest thing the online superstore has going for it is convenience. Once you buy an item on Amazon, buying the next one is a one-click affair. But go to another store, and you’ve got to enter your credit card info all over again. Amazon wins for convenience, and over time, it’s earned buyers’ trust.
Will people trust Google? I bet they will. Google will push its high-end partners–Buy.com, Starbucks, Timberland, and Levi Strauss are all part of the launch–and the Google Checkout logo will appear on AdSense items from these and other vendors. This flag will take on a Visa-like pervasiveness. If Google is good enough at handling dispute resolution, people will come to trust it, they’ll enjoy its convenience, and Amazon’s value-add will be thwarted by 10,000 other stores all sharing one payment system.
Stores will pay Google a small fee for their transactions. This is a potentially gigantic revenue stream for Google, but more importantly, if successful, no other online company will end up knowing as much about the spending behaviors of online consumers as Google. This data is no doubt going to go toward making online ads even more targeted and effective (and thus possibly more expensive), which will also add handsomely to Google’s income.
For this reason, I think the Checkout fee structure is backward: Google should be paying its merchants for the privilege of capturing all their transaction data, rather than charging them for each transaction.
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