Looks like Google are going to take on Paypal in the online payment game.
This has to be good news for online traders (such as me) – Paypal have a near-monopoly on the online money transfer market (at least on sites that don’t have their own credit card processing stuff). Paypal is safe and secure, and fairly easy to use, but monopolies are rarely a good idea.
There are others at around – on my online cd shop, people can pay by Paypal or NoChex – a UK only credit/debit card processing engine, that works well and is used by a few people – I still get about 25 Paypal sales to ever NoChex one.
So if Google come up with an alternative, hopefully it’ll make Paypal streamline and broaden their service in an attempt to stay ahead, and it means the google service will have to be really good to move people away from paypal.
If you haven’t used paypal before, feel free to try it out in my online store… 