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Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don't use Google Checkout for your business
- mauricio 18y agoGoogle seems to generally ignore customer support altogether. My company used to pay $750/yr for their anti-spam enterprise scanning package they sell as a separate product from Google Apps. When I contacted them, via email, about a bug I had found, they said email support was only available to customers that spend $1000/yr or more. They sent me a link to their Google forums...
- mauricio 18y agoDoesn't Google even use script.aculo.us themselves?
- ivankirigin 18y agoPayPal killed lots of accounts to fight fraud, pissing off lots of people. I think payments makes for an adversarial business, making customer support harder.
- lecha 18y agoIs there anything you think you were doing that may be interpreted as fraud?
- ahoyhere 18y agoDoubt it. We were selling an ebook package (automated digital delivery) about JavaScript performance.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoDid you sing the appropriate praises of Chrome with regard to JS performance?
- ahoyhere 18y agototally OT but thanks for the laugh, I'm in a bad mood and it helped ;)
- briansmith 18y agoIs it possible that people paid for the book, and then some kind of technical issue prevented them from being able to download the book? I am also selling digital content and this is my #1 concern regarding payment processing. Now, I am using PayPal's authorize-and-settle function. I don't settle the transaction until I see in my logs that the user has downloaded the item. If more than a few hours has passed then I email the customer and ask them if they are having some kind of problem with the download.
- ahoyhere 18y agoI don't believe so, I haven't heard from any users about any issues except with spam blockers. And those folks emailed me, I resent them a download link myself, and then they always wrote back "yeah... it was in spam." EDIT: And we had maybe 10 orders go through Google Checkout, max (thus the $200ish amount). The other 470 or so went thru PayPal.
- briansmith 18y agoThanks, that is very helpful info.
- sireat 18y agoSince you only had 10 orders go through Google Checkout, it is possible there were maybe 4 or 5 additional fraudulent orders which raised some red flag in Google's algorithm. Then again, it could actually be a bug in their algorithm Still, the issue is that Google provides no way of finding out the cause.
- zmimon 18y agoI had an experience where a customer purchased software (about $400 worth) and then after 2 months claimed they never received the email containing the license keys. I attempted to email them through many various routes (eventually from my own google and ISP accounts, even) but they kept claiming they did not receive any email from me. I don't really know if this is true, but if it is, they have the most aggressive SPAM filtering in the universe since I have never experienced this from any other customer. In the end, they issued a chargeback and told VISA it was fraud, and the payment processor, ShareIT refunded the money. ShareIT is pretty expensive, but I must say they were very good about it - they communicated with me directly (real humans), seemed to understand the situation and have not held it against me in any way (as far as I can tell). (no particular point to this, just thought the story might be interesting to others.)
- lsb 18y agoPut the ebook up on Lulu / CreateSpace / Cafepress and keep selling it, at slightly lower margins?
- DenisM 18y agoFrom selling apps through iPhone app store - there are always people who can't figure something out and instead of contacting the seller they lash out in comments and then leave without a trace. Sometimes they just give you a one-star and leave and you have no idea why. Happens all the time, could have happened to you as well. Do what briansmith suggests, you just can't be too cautious.
- xenophanes 18y agoIf google wants to close accounts, that's their right, it's not evil (though it may be a good reason to choose their competitor), but they should pay out the balance on the account first!!
- sgoraya 18y agoIts evil since they did not give any prior notice AND are witholding monies.
- xenophanes 18y agoMy statement says X is not evil but Y is. Then you replied saying the combination of an aspect of X, with Y, is evil. Your reply is consistent with my statement, not contradictory, and is indeed a weaker statement. I say Y is wrong straight out, but you only criticize it in the presence of something else. Yet you seem angrier than me, e.g. the CAPS, and you presented your comment as being about how Google is more evil than I said. So you or I must be misunderstanding something here.
- sgrove 18y agoRegardless of whether or not this is true, it's a very damaging piece for google not to respond to. After reading it, I'm very hesitant to use their checkout service - it simply isn't worth the risk. Hopefully google can step away from their usual "no-comment" ethos and explain a bit about their termination process, and how they try to be fair. If not, this will undoubtedly show up on searches for their checkout service, and lead quite a few people away from it.
- vaksel 18y agoit was only created today, I'm sure once this makes its rounds on digg/reddit/twitter etc, he'll get some clarification
- moe 18y agoI'm also quite surprised to hear this about google (of all companies), considering their Do-No-Evil claim. Terminating accounts without notice would be such an obvious and unnecessary evil that I wonder whether perhaps the mail just got lost in this particular case? Still, providing no obvious contact info for inquiries is a showstopper either way. How am I supposed to trust someone with my money when that someone isn't even willing to talk to me in case of problems?
- sgrove 18y agoYeah, dealing with money is a tricky business, and I could understand them being very harsh about terminating accounts. But there must be some contact and process of winding things down (getting the money owed from google, etc.). Just like you said - You can't trust someone unwilling to talk to you if there's a problem. But then this is google, and they've worked hard to automate things more than any other company. In some cases, perhaps they've automated things farther than their technology is ready to take them.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoYou can't have an attorney represent you in small claims court, but can someone else file and appear on your behalf? If so, perhaps someone in the Bay Area should setup a company that helps people sue Google in small claims court. Charge a couple hundred bucks or something.
- briansmith 18y agoNo, you cannot represent somebody else in small claims court, even if you are a licensed attorney. The plaintiff and the defendant must represent themselves. If either one is a corporation, then an employee of the corporation (not a hired lawyer or consultant) must represent the corporation.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoNot disagreeing, but do you have a source? Also, what if one of the parties is bedridden or something?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mattmcknight 18y agoThat's the whole concept of small claims court (no attorneys). Laws are per state: http://www.courts.state.va.us/pamphlets/small_claims.html http://www.courts.state.va.us/pamphlets/small_claims.html
- chriskelley 18y agoCalifornia Code of Civil Procedure 116.540 [1] "116.540. (a) Except as permitted by this section, no individual other than the plaintiff and the defendant may take part in the conduct or defense of a small claims action." Most of the exceptions detail that the person appearing has to be a regular employee of the plaintiff, if not the plaintiff themselves. [1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=ccp&group=00001-01000&file=116.510-116.570 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=ccp...
- ahoyhere 18y agoI would sue them if it made business sense. But I can't file in small claims court in the right district, and it would end up costing me much more in time and effort to recover the money. Which is probably why you don't hear about people suing them all the time. Which is why I wrote about it, instead.
- briansmith 18y agoWhat do you mean by "the right district"? You don't have to file the claim in Google's juristiction; you can file in your own juristiction.
- teej 18y agoI don't think ahoyhere lives in a US jurisdiction.
- vaksel 18y agoI don't believe thats true. Almost any terms of service agreement specifies that any lawsuit takes place in the company's jurisdiction. Read any credit card contract, and you'll see that if you sue, you gotta go up to Delaware.
- run4yourlives 18y agoYou can't arbitrarily declare who can sue you and how. The court will decide whether the case has merit. I'd be willing to put money on the fact that if you live in the state in question, you can use your local small claims court. EDIT - Especially given that you could argue that Google provided the service in your home state to your home address.
- socialtistics 18y agoSadly you can arbitrarily declare where someone can sue you. In legal terms it is called a "forum-selection clause" and is common in almost every contract you will read here in the US. The party designates what court will hear any dispute regarding the nonperformance of the contract. Google does have a forum-selection clause in their terms of service for Google Checkout so to sue for breach of contract she would have to file in the court stated in the terms of service for Google. One option would be for her to file with a local court and seek jurisdiction. This would be time consuming and costly though. I am not sure exactly how this would work with her being in the UK.
- ahoyhere 18y agoSeems my blog engine pooped the bed. Here's the raw (markdown) text: http://gist.github.com/raw/86239/990e88415f3b2cd1efb909893e33573825b9714a/gistfile1.txt http://gist.github.com/raw/86239/990e88415f3b2cd1efb909893e3...
- markm 18y agoNot having the chance to try Google Checkout as a Canadian merchant (it wasn't available to Canadian merchants at the time we made our payment solution decision), I'm reminded of a very early quote from Max Levchin when he discusses one of the first years after Paypal launched. The quote attributed almost the entire first year of Paypal to fraud. Running and managing 3 CPA campaigns I can now understand why, it seems like everyone with a (stolen) credit card tries to extract the money through online scams. It should have been clearly visible at the time that choosing Google Checkout would have been a risky decision as a merchant because Google was going to inevitably go through some of the same growing pains. Luckily for us, we dodged that bullet - but by no means is payment integration and fraud detection easy.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoAt the risk of being a shameless karma whore, let me note that Levchin's interview in Founders At Work is great and includes a lot of discussion of this issue. Here's a quote that leaps out at me today: LEVCHIN: It's one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision, because, in the end, it's people's money. You don't really want some computer saying "$2.00 for you, nothing for you." You need a human with a brain to say, "Hmm. This looks like fraud, but I really don't think it is."
- wvenable 18y agoI love using Google services: Search, Maps, Gmail, and so on but I've not seen any evidence that even have non-technical support staff. If you call, they can't direct you anywhere. It doesn't seem like a smart place to do business.
- sgoraya 18y agoThe Apps/Enterprise divsion has a support staff and they were helpful when I setup our domain email accts. and with our enterprise licensing of gMaps API.
- mixmax 18y agoGoogle trusts algorithm, not people, and this is what gets them into potential PR disasters like this. Whether the closing of the account was right or not doesn't really matter here, what does matter is that this doesn't convey trust in Google at all. The accountholder is left with no options, and money that has outright been stolen from him by Google - at least this is what the the rest of the world sees. The interesting thing here is that any competent PR or HR person would be able to tell you that this code of conduct was a PR disaster waiting to happen, but apparently the engineers got the last word. It's OK to do regression testing on which words in a CV makes you a potential succesfu hire based on past history (which Google does), but it's not OK to let it replace the hiring process completely. That's what seems to have hapened here. Google should hire some good people-people. They need it.
- DenisM 18y agoHow can you recognize that you have a "people problem" if you and your coworkers are not "people-people" to start with? This is not a simple problem.
- mixmax 18y agoVery very good point. Basically it's the same as non-hackers not being able to recognise good hackers.
- run4yourlives 18y agoHire people that can, specifically for that purpose. Just like a founder that recognizes he/she isn't good at design specifically seeks that skillset in others.
- netsp 18y agoIn retrospect, this is a bad business for Google to have gotten into for that reason. They are not good with the type of problems that come up. I was using paypal the other day & thinking the same thing about them. I came to the conclusion that they never would have made it today. Paypal is harder to use & more confusing then the Banks' online banking platforms. In a way, that's a huge missed opportunity. If they were the super-easy-to-use-and-understand-without-feeling-dumb type of company, they might have taken a stab at being an online bank. They did succeed because the technology was the key. From reports, the technology was just so far ahead of anyone else' that nothing else mattered. Google is not in that boat. There are all sorts of solutions and they all work. It's not adwords where "it's my way or the high way".
- michael_dorfman 18y agoOne obvious lesson here is "read your TOS agreements carefully." In this case, Google seems to reserve for itself rights that most people would find absurd. It's too bad it took an incident like this to publicize them.
- run4yourlives 18y agoYou can't reserve rights that violate the law. Just because a lawyer writes it in a TOS doesn't make it valid.
- ahoyhere 18y agoReread that section that they cite again. It says they can "restrict access to Service," not that they can take my money. It doesn't lay out reclaiming or claiming funds at all. And, as the other commentor says, you cannot opt out of most provided-by-law rights.
- berrow 18y agoThis sounds like the google algorithm for account termination has some hair-trigger based on chargebacks. It basically means that a disgruntled (or just plain vindictive) customer can take you out on a whim regardless of the truth of the claim. The google model is not based on wetware or 'operators standing by'. It is based on arrays of machines running code that will spit out notifications (if their fraud alert is triggered) that are designed to discourage you from ever calling. There isn't anyone back there. In this case you get what you pay for and your business is just hanging in the breeze.
- jedberg 18y agoI used to work with the anti-fraud folks at PayPal. Most of them jumped ship to Google about 2 years ago. PayPal was data driven, but required a human to verify the results. Google is simply data driven. That should help explain why they seem even worse than PayPal.
- netsp 18y agoI would have guessed that if you wanted to create a paypal for the next ten years you would want to go the opposite direction on the technology >> people friendliness continuum. There is a lot to be done on making payment online painless & friendly. There is lots to be done in making accepting money easier and friendlier. There is even more to be done in making managing money cleverly easy. I'm not sure how much work is still to be done on making those things safe & fraud proof. That happens less publicly. Could be a lot to do. But I suspect that the projectile in the other direction.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- dschobel 18y agoTerrible customer service makes them evil? You have my full sympathies and it's a crappy situation but that has got to be the most banal version of evil I've ever heard of.
- blurry 18y ago"Don't be evil" is google's corporate motto. I believe that's what she was referring to.
- nomoresecrets 18y agoDid you miss the part where they kept the client's money, with no explanation whatsoever, and the client's only recompense is to sue Google, probably costing more money in the end? For a lot of people, that's close to some definition of evil at any rate. Either that or incompetence. But when it comes to money, most people view incompetence that ends up with their money being stolen as pretty much the same as evil.
- krschultz 18y ago$2300 is not a small number to me if its basically flushed down a toilet
- davidmurphy 18y agoWow. I will NEVER, ever use Google Checkout after reading this -- unless I see a very, very, very, VERY convincing response from Google.
- andreyf 18y agoWhy not? -or- Have you ever driven in a car? What do you suppose is more likely - a false positive in Google's fraud detection, or dying in a car accident?
- jsackmann 18y agoThanks for posting this. Since I haven't seen any positive comments about Checkout in the comments, so far, I figured I'd chime in. I've been using Checkout since about January 2007 to sell digital resources through my site gmathacks.com. In that time, I've had thousands of purchases through Checkout with gross sales well over $100k. Having had problems with PayPal before (not with this business, but a previous one), I was careful from the outset -- I generally err on the side of refunding people, I follow Checkout's procedure (click the "shipped" button, even though it's a digital product, etc.) to a "t," and I do the best I can with customer service in general. My experience has, quite simply, been great. Checkout's algorithm seems to reject some purchasers more readily than other systems do (often, I think, because their IP doesn't match the country in their credit card address), which is better than a recent experience of mine through PayPal, when a $200 purchase was reversed weeks later because of a fraud concern. (Which turned out to be false.) All the while, the fees charged have been way cheaper than PayPal's. (This, unfortunately, is changing. Depending on your monthly sales, Checkout fees are going up as much as 40% in the next month or two.) I will say that little has happened to turn Checkout against me -- in 2+ years, my chargeback rate is just a shade over 0.1%. And as noted, I'm aware of some of the risks, so I've trod carefully. All of this certainly isn't a defense for Checkout's (non-existent?) customer service and apparently faulty algorithms. But...while I'm glad to be aware of situations like this, I'll continue to happily use Checkout and recommend to others that they do the same.
- andreyf 18y agoOk, now we have two self-selected samples of experiences with Google checkout. While I appreciate your post, I'd like to point out that statistically speaking, we still have learned nothing about the risk/benefits associated with using Google checkout. sigh
- dpapathanasiou 18y agoYou're right. I wonder why Google closed the account: was it that b/c she never clicked "Shipped" to any of the orders and so Google's algorithm thought the account fraudulent, or was there another reason? If Google doesn't come clean on the reason, it's going to lose a lot of future customers.
- pg 18y agoThe general implications of this are quite interesting. It means you can compete with Google at anything where really good customer service is an advantage, because the concept of customer service (except at such low granularity as generating good, fast search results) is so alien to their culture.
- dmh2000 18y agothere are already lots of credit card processors that compete on service. they cost more to use (both in fees and your labor to setup). people buy on cost then wonder why their cheaper solution isn't as good as the pricier one. like people who buy the cheapest airline ticket then gripe that the food wasn't good. you get what you pay for.
- davidw 18y agoIMO, this is a problem with many things - it's very easy to focus on that which is quantifiable, and ignore the fuzzier stuff. For instance, I did a comparison of Linode and Slicehost which has proved quite popular, but one of the things I stated up front was that while it's possible to measure costs and things like memory and disk, it's not really possible to easily compare service, especially as for the most part, hosting is invisible, and service only becomes critical in an emergency. Economics in general suffers from this problem too. It's easy to quantify things related to money, but much more difficult to deal with the benefits from more abstract things.
- jskopek 18y agoService is a feature that's much harder to quantify, but there _are_ ways of demonstrating it. One of the best recent examples I've seen is http://www.engineyard.com/ http://www.engineyard.com/, which lists its sales & support phone numbers on the header of each page. In this day and age, where phone numbers are being increasingly hidden, a company that stands out like that really makes a good impact.
- fauigerzigerk 18y agoThat's right in general, but a payment processor cutting off the service without notice or explanation isn't comparable to bad food on a cheapo flight. It's more like offloading passengers during a stopover in Mogadishu.
- andomar 18y agoTreating 1 out of 10.000 customers badly is hard to avoid.
- chanux 18y agoBut if you are a company (a good one), you should have a backup plan to help that 1 user.
- andreyf 18y agoAnd what would you suggest that backup plan should be? Keep in mind that the false positive rate is probably about 1 out of 100, and fraudsters are going to get really big payouts if they figure out a way around your backup plan.
- 10ren 18y agoGoogle check-out completes their advertising chain management, enabling assessable advertising. Instead of pay-per-click, you can pay-per-pay. It really is a fantastic concept for trying to optimize marketing automatically. Problem: they suck at it. So... this function really helps their mission, but they can't do it. Therefore, they should outsource this function, or spin off a startup so that it can operate on the values needed for success in it.
- 2cool 18y agodon't be evil
- chanux 18y agoGoogle: Don't show evil.
- mwexler 18y agoMatt Cutts responded in the comments that he will take a look at it. I guess this teaches us that the only way to get help from Google is to blog, get it picked up by the aggregators, get a "celebrity" blogger to notice, and hope he follows through. That's not encouraging. Of course, many big companies have the same problems... so, can we propose a better way without it involving call centers or other massive human investment? Some human investment is great, but any solution involving "hire lots of people to help" won't fly.
- ahoyhere 18y agoYes, I saw that this morning. (Was out and about yesterday.) For my follow up, I was planning to say essentially what you've said: If it takes a massive blog publicity campaign to get somebody to look into it, there's still something rotten in Denmark. (Aaaand... nobody's contacted me about the $2k from the Scriptaculous Adsense money.)
- eli 18y agoGoogle has always had remarkably bad customer service with all their products. I'm not really sure how they get away with it. Of course, paypal is pretty bad too, so if there's are the only two options you're considering, it's probably a wash.
- ahoyhere 18y agoPaypal's gotten a lot better. In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers (I'll count myself in that group), and probably because of the govt stepping in and forcing them to act like the financial institution that they are. You can call PayPal. There are actual people. They may be stubborn, but they are there. You can find out why your account is closed. And there are precedents. Google Checkout: no contact. You can't call them. You can't email them. You can't appeal. No one, as far as I've been able to tell, is in charge of this beast.
- eli 18y agoIn part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers I think the federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of customers who had accounts frozen may have played a bigger role.
- eli 18y agoHere are people complaining about this a year ago: http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-payouts/browse_thread/thread/4b5a70d1d951a18d?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-payouts/brows... I think the lesson is, do your homework on researching partners -- don't just trust a brand name.
- ahoyhere 18y agoOr the lesson is, that the people who get screwed ought to be a lot more vocal about it to help other people in the future :) I'm doing my part.
- jseifer 18y agoAs of the time of this comment, typing "google paypal" in to Google search has this link as the #2 result. I'm wondering if that will put anyone off.
- Freaky 18y agoThey sound exactly like PayPal. When they closed my account, I had about 100,000 successful payments, my own "personal account manager" and all that jazz. One day they noticed we had an adult section and closed our account without any warning and completely stonewalled any attempt to contact them. $200? Good for you, we lost about £1500. At least when our Bank objected to our XXX section, they gave us time to do something about it. Of course, PayPal also didn't want quarter of a million in a bond to insure against chargebacks.
- mbowles 18y agoVery interesting...if Microsoft pulled something like this...every person and govt in the world would be screamin bloody murder.
- ahoyhere 18y agoBrief update (will write more in depth later today): Some Google person with no last name & a fake-sounding first name (Sophie?) wrote me a very impersonal, automated sounding email that said: "During a recent review it has come to our attention that your merchant account ID amy@slash7.com was closed due to a technical error. We apologies for the inconvenience it might have caused. We have re-activated your account and you are eligible to receive payouts." Riiight. A recent review. Guess that had nothing to do with the fact that you guys made this topic a front page news item. So now I've got my $200. Hoo-ray. But this is ridiculous. I don't care about the money. I will never use Google Checkout again, once my money is out. And I plan to continue to agitate for them to improve their policies, because I know I'm not alone in being ripped off... I'm just more loudmouthed and vindictive than most people. Also, no word at all on the over $2,000 USD that was in the script.aculo.us Adsense account. That's Google essentially stealing from an open source project. I just can't believe it. By the way... My thanks to all the people outside & especially inside of Google who have tried to look into this case to the best of their ability. I truly appreciate it. The problem is that it's no one's fault that my account got closed, and therefore no one's responsibility to fix it, either.
- elv 18y agoholy shit "let us be evil" and what if they delist you to claim your rights? time to turn to yahoo?
- andreyf 18y agoWee!
- aditya 18y agoIntense. What has happened?