Google Checkout Appears

Google Checkout, aka the PayPal-killer, made its debut last night. I’m most surprised by the name honestly. Google has been going the very generic route lately (Analytics, Spreadsheet, Page Creator, etc) and Checkout almost seems like a marketing person might have been in the room by accident when they were naming it. But anyway, Checkout isn’t very similar to PayPal but with Google’s lower processing fees I could see a lot of stores either switching or offering both. Google also appears to be undercutting most of the credit card companies too who take much more per transaction than I had thought. Currently about 100 stores allow you to pay with your Google Checkout account and there are about ten that are giving $10 discounts on a $20 purchase if you use your new Checkout account right now. If you’ve always hoped for a one-stop shopping identity Google Checkout could be what you’ve waited for.

I use PayPal fairly often for both receiving and giving money, so I quickly created an account without looking at what I was doing. Turns out that I created an account to spend money, but not to receive money. After looking around a bitt I wasn’t able to find any information telling me how I could set up a business account and haven’t seen any mention of it in other people’s posts. Checkout looks like it will be great for stores but I’m not sure how popular it will end up if individuals won’t be able to do anything other than spend. PayPal works pretty good for that too, why switch?

UPDATE: Google Checkout is in fact the Amazon-killer, not the PayPal-killer that I thought it was. I had no idea they were working on an Amazon-killer to be honest. I’ve been reading so much about the PayPal-killer that I assumed this was it. Do you find it as amazing as I do that pretty much anything Google tries people immediately define it as a InsertCompanyName-killer? Om Malik has a great post about Google Checkout taking on Amazon, eBay and Yahoo for online transactions.