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Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

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Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#61
post #22

Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Result: 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). 2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your pl…

Not that I disagree with your basic premise but I wonder why some companies get away with this type of thing and others don't. Your example of Apple is an obvious one but they have plenty of "failures" on their hands as well. Whether it is something that is dead on arrival like Ping or the company letting one of its old marquee products die a slow death like the MacPro or iPod classic, Apple seems to be able to brush…

The services Apple kills are usually rubbish. Ping, Mobile Me, those iPod speakers. Google is killing things that are actually good. I think that is where the Reader backlash came from. Reader was good even if the relative popularity was low.

Hardware is kind of a different thing. The iPod was pretty nice. But now I want a shinier iPod with more features. Production of the Classic just has to match demand from those with niche uses for it. So a slow death makes sense?

Not sure what the situation is with the MacPro...

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#62
post #19

Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Result: 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). 2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your pl…

Completely agree. I'm so disappointed in Google for having Checkout for years and not doing anything serious with it. I really wanted it to become a serious alternative to Paypal. But it's like they never even tried. And it turned out to be huge mistake for them because they could've really used Checkout accounts from day one of Android, to get people to pay for Android apps. I still believe this has been one of the…

As someone who used to recruit for Google, and watched the team recruit THOUSANDS of developers only to discontinue product after product, wtf are these guys all doing?

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#64

Although Google Checkouts is shutting down, Google Wallet for Digital Goods still lives on ( https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449 ). It offers pretty much the best pricing on the net (most favorable of 5% or 1.9% + 30c (USD) per transaction is automatically applied.) and works in way more countries and currencies than Google Checkout ever did ( https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/digital/…

I feel like no one actually read the submission. Google Checkout and Google Wallet overlapped too much, and Wallet won out. If your website uses Checkout, just replace it with Wallet, and move on with your life.

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#65
post #5

anyone taking bets... ehm willing to speculate on what big is next dying at google? I'm thinking about google tv, or is that Q already gone? music? books? I'm happy to see G staying on the marketing garden

I think the next thing Google will kill is its search engine... :)

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#66
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford…

Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.

I use Dropbox every day. It just works. I don't need anything new from them, I'm perfectly fine with product that just works. Contrary to popular opinion, most people aren't 5-year-olds with short attention span, that constantly need something new to not get bored. They are busy people with little time to spare, and once they found something that works for them, they'd rather it keep working than search for something "new" that may or may not be useful for them.

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#67
post #2

It's a real shame that Google Checkout never really was what was promised, we've integrated it into our shop and we have more GoCardless payments than Google Checkout, it was a horrible system to deal with and I won't miss it when it goes (and if I ever get a response about the Stripe UK beta I'll be swapping that quick sharpish) We've had more declined transactions on Google Checkout than PayPal + GoCardless put tog…

(I work at Stripe.) Sorry you haven't gotten one yet! I just sent an invite your way.

Is this for e-commerce? I just suspected you guys didn't seriously consider e-commerce since you don't do pre-auth and settlement. It being illegal to charge the customer before shipping in some countries and such.

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#68

Anyone have any idea if this effectively terminates any existing recurring Google Checkout subscription payments (on November 20)? If so, that's kind of a big deal. Cutting off merchants from their revenue stream is a great way to get people really angry and could easily destroy a business.

Did you read the post?

> If you don't have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months. To make things easier, we've partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options.

So you have 6 months and several options for migration.

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#69
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford…

Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.

It's overrated, but all the other competing services are much worse? I'm confused.

Re: Google Checkout will be retired, transition to Google Wallet

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, how is Drive much worse? I agree about Dropbox, but I don't think Drive is any worse. If anything the experience I've had with it has been more positive for the simple fact that it integrates with the existing google services I use a lot better (i.e. attachments in gmail). But I don't think it would be fair for me to hold that against Dropbox. Additionally, I haven't had much time with th…

As I mentioned below Google Drive loses data and is unacceptably buggy. Just see the product forums for the countless examples of it happening. I see no reason why you wouldn't go with Dropbox. Even just for the fact that you shouldn't rely on anything from Google that doesn't have or is related to advertising.

Does it really matter that it isn't tied to Google's ad ecosystem if it has its own revenue stream (paid plans for increased storage)? I know everyone's been a bit shaken up with google's flurry of closures, but this isn't like reader, it's actually being monetized. Not to mention that Google recently consolidated Gmail and Picasa/G+ photo storage into Drive accounts -- this hints that google's long-term plan might be to treat Drive like a sort of unified storage system. This makes sense given google's recent push to unify everything, and should ensure it some stability. If anything, it's more likely that they'll kill off Chrome OS/Chromebooks (which heavily rely on Drive) before they kill off Drive[1], so I feel relatively safe with it. I would go so far as to say that Dropbox feels just as safe because Google isn't exactly a competitor that should be underestimated (despite their many flops).

Either way, I use Docs way too much, to the point where I always have a tab with it open, and Drive really ties everything in quite smoothly for me. I also like the Drive app a bit more than the Dropbox app on my android phone, so not really a strong incentive for me to switch back. I actually never made much of a conscious decision to switch to Drive in the first place, it just kind of happened automatically due to convenience, and now I use it almost exclusively.

The only thing that does bug me is the data-loss. I haven't had it happen in Drive proper, but it happening in the short time I've used Keep certainly lends credibility to it being a wider-spread problem. We'll see...

[1] Not that I feel ChromeOS is 'safe' from the killswitch, but it's still a bit too early to tell what their plan is for that exactly

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