Assorted Ramblings and Filings.

Welcome to the PodShop blog. Pull up a chair. Read. Write. Interact.

Google officially announced their online payment service today. Dubbed Google Checkout, it looks promising. I’m looking into the first level API integration for now.

UPDATE: I’ve signed up for Google Checkout account, which was relatively quick and painless. Similar to setting up a PayPal account, the process was very straight forward. There’s an option to link up your Checkout account with your AdWords account (if you don’t have a pre-existing AdWords account, you can set up both types of accounts during this process), which enables you to save money on the standard Checkout transaction fee of 2% plus $.20. This default rate is already lower than the bottom-tiered (i.e. most expensive) PayPal account, which is 2.9% plus $.30 per transaction.

I haven’t implemented the Google Checkout processing on the Store page yet, as there is much API stuff that I will need to fully dig into first, but an overview of Google’s Checkout API documentation reveals that they really did their homework and have things fully documented and explained for developers. I really like the XML guts of it all, which reminds me of it’s familiarity to their Sitemaps program. Screenshots in a few of the examples have dates showing April of 2005, so Google has been working on this for a while (you might recall the initial announcement of this last spring).

I’m definitely excited to see how Checkout could make its way into the PodShop Store page. Most likely, I would run PayPal and Checkout simultaneously, and perhaps at some stage cut over to Checkout exclusively. Time will tell how Checkout is perceived by both buyers and sellers.