4 ms·

Google Checkout still unfit for business: I got my money, but would you?

73 points by ahoyhere 18y ago

dmaclay 18y ago
Even high-profile complaints will only ever result in case by case resolutions. Now if someone was able to start a business where they bought the rights to seized google checkout accounts at say 10 cents to the dollar and (now representing sufficient monetary sums to make action worthwhile) launched serious legal campaigns to retrieve the funds, then google would revise their policies. If I were owed money by google in this way, I'd happily give 90% to a third party, just to see google get nailed (particularly if it helped force a policy change so that no more 'little guys' were victimised).
- ahoyhere 18y ago
  I suspect you're right, dmaclay, but high-profile complaints might inspire more people to complain publically which might build the base for a class-action lawsuit like the one against PayPal. Or maybe reform. (Ha!) That's my hope, anyway.
  - bk 18y ago
    Thanks, Amy, for sticking to making your point, and not just going along with the PR game of "Yay, they fixed it, they're great again, group hug!" Your degree of differentiation (e.g. individuals at Google versus Google, Inc.) does a great service to the community and puts legitimate pressure on Google in a sensible way while avoiding the Internet ad hominem culture.
    - ahoyhere 18y ago
      Thanks. :)
- andreyf 18y ago
  And how would you protect from fraudsters using your service?
  - dmaclay 18y ago
    The 10 cents to the dollar allows you to absorb some fraud. You also check the applicants records, and for those cases where there is too much uncertainty offer payment only after a successful lawsuit (you my want to pay out 25 cents to the dollar in these cases to reflect the reduced risk).
    - andreyf 18y ago
      I'm not sure if you understand what the fraud ratio is. Especially in the beginning, you should expect 99 out of 100 users to be fraudulent. Basically, in order to make this idea successful, you have to solve the fraud problem a lot better than Google does... which seems unlikely.
  - jibiki 18y ago
    There's a famous music sharing group where you can only become a member if someone vouches for you. If someone snitches, then they are thrown out of the group along with the person who vouched for them. (Or something like that.) This sort of system seems like the right idea for preventing fraudulent sellers.
    - andreyf 18y ago
      That seems absurdly easy to game... but even if it worked, wouldn't Google or PayPal be doing it?
    - drockcore 18y ago
      i like this system of enterance .please vouche away. harden rock.
ScottWhigham 18y ago
It's unfortunate that you had to go through all of that just to get Google to do the right thing. Certainly in this arena Google's image has been tarnished (further?).
seldo 18y ago
Essentially, the way Google Checkout can afford to be cheaper than PayPal is by relying on their much-vaunted algorithms to take as many human beings out of the loop as possible. That's why there's almost no way to talk to a human being in AdSense, AdWords or Checkout: human beings are slow and expensive. However, algorithms are not foolproof, and in the case of Checkout the desire to never have merchants talking to real people means that when the algorithm gets it wrong, these merchants have nobody to talk to, no phone number to reach, nothing. It seems pretty evil, and unless Google want to raise their rates on Checkout to match PayPal, it seems pretty unavoidable. This is just another case of You Get What You Pay For, except in this case nobody thought Google would have a shitty product.
- blasdel 18y ago
  Google Checkout was cheaper than PayPal as a subsidy. At the beginning of May they're eliminating the Adsense subsidy, and changing the rates to mirror PayPal's exactly. It's over.
froo 18y ago
Perhaps Google should use the 200 sales and marketing staff that they are about to lay off http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/changes-to-our-sales-and-marketing.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/changes-to-our-sales-... ... and reroute them into some sort of review team so that these kinds of errors don't happen again to what looks like lots of people over several Google products? That's one way to keep their "do no evil" dream alive. Clearly you would think sales and marketing people would have the skills to deal with people.
- SingAlong 18y ago
  Perfect idea. I just read news in my local newspaper that they were going to hire 360 guys while they were laying of 200 (mostly from far-flung regions). As per what I read on HN, the interview process is very long (around 8 months I read). So instead of spending another 8 months hiring those 360 guys, they should instead transfer those 200 to some kinda special service review team directly interacting with customers and doing those weird tests they often do for color shades (just pick random people and ask whats kinda painful to use their service). P.S: It would be a lot better if they also had a 'human' review team to review banned accounts. This would eliminate the errors made by the algorithms. Since the industry standard for fraud is just around 1.5% the review team should be able to handle it easily.
indiejade 18y ago
OP said: "How much business did I lose? I have no idea how many potential customers tried to buy our JavaScript Performance ebook through Google Checkout and saw a message that our account was disabled." The irony of this whole issue is the complaint is resultant from the site attempting to sell an eBook on JavaScript. What possibly happened is that this particular "technical error" was resultant from some kind of conflict between the eBook's syntactically sketchy JavaScript references (perhaps there are code examples within the eBook) and the way that Google Checkout wants to handle JavaScript. I would think somebody touting and attempting to _sell_ the "performance" virtues of JavaScript would also be aware of the potential evil that JavaScript can do. "Don't get me wrong: I don't hate Google or people inside Google . . . rather, the way Google's abstract, corporate algorithms have treated me." It's probably a very good thing that this "technical error" was indeed preemptively caught by the "abstract, corporate algorithm." After all, JavaScript can be evil. I would say. . . score one for Google Checkout. Sometimes better safe than sorry.
- ahoyhere 18y ago
  You make a very bad conspiracy theorist. Or comedian. The language isn't slow, implementations of it are. Regardless, you can still maximize the performance of something slow, even if that local maximum is not extremely fast in the absolute sense. We cover the whole range of techniques, from better architecture, DOM tweaking, and the maximization of specific bits of code. The contents of the book never touch Google Checkout, even in their zipped form. I wasn't aware publically boasting of ignorance was cool after junior high.
  - indiejade 18y ago
    I never said the language was slow. I said it can be used to do evil things. Your translation was that Google is somehow "evil" for not implicitly allowing your profit-making motives upon potentially evil exploits. So you got chastised by some security check for a technical error. Technical errors happen all the time. Get over it. BTW where, exactly, in this eBook do you do you cover security issues related to JavaScript? The contents of the book never touch Google Checkout Specifically, where do you cover what "touching" means, in a network's mind? . See: http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/07/16/ http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/07/16/ Also, this: http://message.worldbank.org/isp_403.html http://message.worldbank.org/isp_403.html (Part-time comedian, part time FBI agent)

73 points by ahoyhere 18y ago

Even high-profile complaints will only ever result in case by case resolutions. Now if someone was able to start a business where they bought the rights to seized google checkout accounts at say 10 cents to the dollar and (now representing sufficient monetary sums to make action worthwhile) launched serious legal campaigns to retrieve the funds, then google would revise their policies. If I were owed money by google in this way, I'd happily give 90% to a third party, just to see google get nailed (particularly if it helped force a policy change so that no more 'little guys' were victimised).

ahoyhere 18y ago
I suspect you're right, dmaclay, but high-profile complaints might inspire more people to complain publically which might build the base for a class-action lawsuit like the one against PayPal. Or maybe reform. (Ha!) That's my hope, anyway.
- bk 18y ago
  Thanks, Amy, for sticking to making your point, and not just going along with the PR game of "Yay, they fixed it, they're great again, group hug!" Your degree of differentiation (e.g. individuals at Google versus Google, Inc.) does a great service to the community and puts legitimate pressure on Google in a sensible way while avoiding the Internet ad hominem culture.
  - ahoyhere 18y ago
    Thanks. :)
andreyf 18y ago
And how would you protect from fraudsters using your service?
- dmaclay 18y ago
  The 10 cents to the dollar allows you to absorb some fraud. You also check the applicants records, and for those cases where there is too much uncertainty offer payment only after a successful lawsuit (you my want to pay out 25 cents to the dollar in these cases to reflect the reduced risk).
  - andreyf 18y ago
    I'm not sure if you understand what the fraud ratio is. Especially in the beginning, you should expect 99 out of 100 users to be fraudulent. Basically, in order to make this idea successful, you have to solve the fraud problem a lot better than Google does... which seems unlikely.
- jibiki 18y ago
  There's a famous music sharing group where you can only become a member if someone vouches for you. If someone snitches, then they are thrown out of the group along with the person who vouched for them. (Or something like that.) This sort of system seems like the right idea for preventing fraudulent sellers.
  - andreyf 18y ago
    That seems absurdly easy to game... but even if it worked, wouldn't Google or PayPal be doing it?
  - drockcore 18y ago
    i like this system of enterance .please vouche away. harden rock.

ScottWhigham 18y ago

It's unfortunate that you had to go through all of that just to get Google to do the right thing. Certainly in this arena Google's image has been tarnished (further?).

seldo 18y ago

Essentially, the way Google Checkout can afford to be cheaper than PayPal is by relying on their much-vaunted algorithms to take as many human beings out of the loop as possible. That's why there's almost no way to talk to a human being in AdSense, AdWords or Checkout: human beings are slow and expensive. However, algorithms are not foolproof, and in the case of Checkout the desire to never have merchants talking to real people means that when the algorithm gets it wrong, these merchants have nobody to talk to, no phone number to reach, nothing. It seems pretty evil, and unless Google want to raise their rates on Checkout to match PayPal, it seems pretty unavoidable. This is just another case of You Get What You Pay For, except in this case nobody thought Google would have a shitty product.

blasdel 18y ago
Google Checkout was cheaper than PayPal as a subsidy. At the beginning of May they're eliminating the Adsense subsidy, and changing the rates to mirror PayPal's exactly. It's over.

froo 18y ago

Perhaps Google should use the 200 sales and marketing staff that they are about to lay off http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/changes-to-our-sales-and-marketing.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/changes-to-our-sales-... ... and reroute them into some sort of review team so that these kinds of errors don't happen again to what looks like lots of people over several Google products? That's one way to keep their "do no evil" dream alive. Clearly you would think sales and marketing people would have the skills to deal with people.

SingAlong 18y ago
Perfect idea. I just read news in my local newspaper that they were going to hire 360 guys while they were laying of 200 (mostly from far-flung regions). As per what I read on HN, the interview process is very long (around 8 months I read). So instead of spending another 8 months hiring those 360 guys, they should instead transfer those 200 to some kinda special service review team directly interacting with customers and doing those weird tests they often do for color shades (just pick random people and ask whats kinda painful to use their service). P.S: It would be a lot better if they also had a 'human' review team to review banned accounts. This would eliminate the errors made by the algorithms. Since the industry standard for fraud is just around 1.5% the review team should be able to handle it easily.

indiejade 18y ago

OP said: "How much business did I lose? I have no idea how many potential customers tried to buy our JavaScript Performance ebook through Google Checkout and saw a message that our account was disabled." The irony of this whole issue is the complaint is resultant from the site attempting to sell an eBook on JavaScript. What possibly happened is that this particular "technical error" was resultant from some kind of conflict between the eBook's syntactically sketchy JavaScript references (perhaps there are code examples within the eBook) and the way that Google Checkout wants to handle JavaScript. I would think somebody touting and attempting to _sell_ the "performance" virtues of JavaScript would also be aware of the potential evil that JavaScript can do. "Don't get me wrong: I don't hate Google or people inside Google . . . rather, the way Google's abstract, corporate algorithms have treated me." It's probably a very good thing that this "technical error" was indeed preemptively caught by the "abstract, corporate algorithm." After all, JavaScript can be evil. I would say. . . score one for Google Checkout. Sometimes better safe than sorry.

ahoyhere 18y ago
You make a very bad conspiracy theorist. Or comedian. The language isn't slow, implementations of it are. Regardless, you can still maximize the performance of something slow, even if that local maximum is not extremely fast in the absolute sense. We cover the whole range of techniques, from better architecture, DOM tweaking, and the maximization of specific bits of code. The contents of the book never touch Google Checkout, even in their zipped form. I wasn't aware publically boasting of ignorance was cool after junior high.
- indiejade 18y ago
  I never said the language was slow. I said it can be used to do evil things. Your translation was that Google is somehow "evil" for not implicitly allowing your profit-making motives upon potentially evil exploits. So you got chastised by some security check for a technical error. Technical errors happen all the time. Get over it. BTW where, exactly, in this eBook do you do you cover security issues related to JavaScript? The contents of the book never touch Google Checkout Specifically, where do you cover what "touching" means, in a network's mind? . See: http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/07/16/ http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/07/16/ Also, this: http://message.worldbank.org/isp_403.html http://message.worldbank.org/isp_403.html (Part-time comedian, part time FBI agent)