This article today points up one of the things that you need to be careful about when assessing third-party services to integrate into your web solutions. This particular case concerns Google’s Checkout, an e-commerce offering that is Google’s answer to PayPal, and allows the handling of payment processing.
Google’s ability to handle recurring payments, such as monthly subscriptions to a service that are automatically billed once a month, has been impaired since around the middle of August with little notice by the outside world. A customer first reported the issue in a Google Checkout forum in August.
For customers who rely on recurring billing (the model used by any publisher selling subscription access to premium content, for example), this is a real problem. The bigger problem is that Google apparently has taken its typical tack of providing only forum-based support–for a business-critical problem that has lasted almost a month.
While Google has clearly provided a lot of benefits for the Internet ecosphere with its free developer and site owner tools (Google Analytics, JavaScript library hosting, code hosting, and App Engine, for example) and consumer Internet tools (Google Docs, Maps, GMail, etc.), I for one am nervous about a company that does not have to provide good service. That Google throws off enormous amounts of cash with its search advertising gig cuts both ways: it can afford to develop these other tools for “free”, but it is also not compelled to invest sufficiently to provide quality support.
It’s very difficult to imagine PayPal, for whom such business is its business, ignoring an issue like this. For Google, it is, unfortunately, quite easy to imagine that it simply does not rate. You can be sure that if AdWords ads weren’t showing, Messrs. Page and Brin would be on it—yesterday.
via Recurring problems with Google Checkout | Relevant Results – CNET News.
Tags: business models, google checkout, paypal
That definitely frustrates me when working with Google’s AdWords. There is a Geographic Performance Report that simply doesn’t work right — it excludes about 85% of the ad impressions for some unknown reason. And there’s no way to get support for it. An email sent to the customer support address was never replied to, and posts on the forums never get a response from Google either.
And like Checkout, AdWords is something we are paying good cash money for.