Ironvine Search Marketing

The New York Times published an article today about “Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory” which includes a report from Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor about the waves Google Checkout is making in the online marketing pool against services like eBay and PayPal.

Read Page 1 Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory

The article explains how merchants are starting to take advantage of Google’s Checkout service and the marketing impacts it is having. Checkout is slowly pulling some of the marketing dollars away from services like eBay and PayPal (which are partnered exclusively). Their latest marketing tactic has been mentioned before in this blog, Google Checkout Free Until the End of 2007.

The savings merchants get from the free processing seem to be worth reallocating at least some of the marketing dollars they currently spend elsewhere. At least the merchant profiled in the article has taken some of his eBay listing budget to spend on Google AdWords to sell his product.

Read Page 2 Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory

Google Checkout is not the full money processing service PayPal is, which allows you to transfer money, store funds, and withdraw/deposit money to and from a bank account. Checkout is only a credit card storage payment system which allows you to make purchases online securely without having to enter your personal details for each and every purchase. You log on with your Google account and you are set.

If you use Google Checkout and you also advertise online with Google AdWords, you automatically get an extra little shopping cart graphic added to your paid search ads. “So by having a Checkout icon that increases click-through rates, over time advertisers will have to pay less to get the same ranking for their ads. Or, they could pay the same amount for more ads with better placement, Mr. Wingo [CEO ChannelAdvisor] said.” Having that extra icon added to your ads helps users find the ad more appealing and the ad will have a higher probability to be clicked through.

They have had some growing pains, and some prosessing delays that have caused some merchants to be wary or back away from using Checkout right now. However, the system is continuing to grow and will eventually become a more dominant figure in the payment market as time goes on.

Stability concerns with a big name company product, sounds like Microsoft product releases. I would imagine that most merchants are waiting till after the busiest (holiday shopping) time of the year before adding a new service to their websites. But, as with Microsoft, I expect to see Google to have a sharp increase in merchant users and transactions in the early part of 2007.

You can read Scot Wingo’s take on his eBay Strategies blog - Great Google Checkout Article in NYT today.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Checkout, marketing, ChannelAdvisor, Ironvine, eBay, PayPal, New York Times, online payment, AdWords