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Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th
- gcatalfamo 13y agoI'd say that signs of an imminent merge with Google Wallet were clearly visible throughout the year...
- jessaustin 13y agoYeah, especially this: May 20th, 2013 Last day to sign up for Google Checkout
- alttab 13y agoExcept they arent merging. Goolge is no longer sulporti g pyshical goods.
- gcatalfamo 13y ago"Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods" Except they are. But I'd say we are both correct.
- eCa 13y agophysical != digital
- aviraldg 13y agoScared, shocked and confused for a moment while I thought Google was shutting down Takeout (which would've been a huge step backward.) This is okay (it's been superseded by Google Wallet anyway.)
- makomk 13y agoIt's apparently been superseded by Google Wallet for digital goods and discontinued with no replacement for everything else, if I'm reading the announcement right?
- arkitaip 13y ago--- No, Google is not offering a replacement processing solution for physical goods and services. We’ve partnered with three premier players in the payments industry to offer alternatives for your eCommerce needs. The links below will guide you to more detailed information about each offering, including negotiated discounts for Checkout users: Payment Processing: Braintree Payments Hosted storefront: Shopify Email invoicing: Freshbooks --- Increasingly often I'm associating Google with poor customer service, poor design and being indifferent to user worries when discontinuing products. Not sure they realize the harm they are causing to their brand, even in the eyes of people who don't actually use the affected products.
- noir_lord 13y agoGoogle have gone from (in my opinion) almost flawless execution to a complete mess, they do stuff that drives me away on an almost daily bases. For example. I've signed into my Gmail and then visit youtube "Do you want to create a Google+ profile" NO "Ok, we'll ask again later". Sign into the admin account for google apps I run for a charity I volunteer at while signed into my work account "connect these two accounts?" NO "Ok, we'll ask later". Reset my android phone, "Play" doesn't work because their is a blocking modal accept terms dialog that isn't on screen, I have to swipe close play then re-open it. Still can't switch primary domain on a google apps account without setting up a new one, migrating data over and shutting down old one. Asking me for my mobile number as a 2nd fallback for my password, NO, if I give you that you already know my android phones number and now you know without a shadow of a doubt who my work account belongs to (it's the obsequiousness that gets to me). Catchall email address still don't work for no apparent reasons. Documentation is an utter and complete mess for Google Apps (referring to multiple versions of the google apps interface, which change about once an hour anyway). ------ I don't want a google+ account, I don't want to connect all my google accounts as some are work, some are private and some belong to charities and such I volunteer for. I don't want you to ask me for other personal data all the time. I will stop using all google services soon if this continues down that path, It's my business I can use anything I want and the level of crap is fast approaching moving all my stuff back in house. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels like this.
- jessaustin 13y agoTitle switching to slightly less informative "Retiring Google Checkout Announcement" in 3, 2, 1...
- paulhauggis 13y agowow, I'm glad I didn't use Google checkout for anything important..
- nateberkopec 13y agoThis is probably because requestAutocomplete has been moved into Chrome Beta, and will probably feature tight Wallet integration. http://www.chromium.org/developers/using-requestautocomplete http://www.chromium.org/developers/using-requestautocomplete
- alttab 13y agoMore likely was Checkout With Amazon.
- tehwebguy 13y agoI don't think Checkout with Amazon has affected them at all. Checkout was closed to new signups since May 20th (from the article), and Wallet has been the digital-goods alternative for longer than that. My guess would be that operating a physical goods processing company is a huge drain on the resource Google hates providing most: customer service. Payment disputes are a pain, especially for physical goods. Some level of mediation is required when someone has purchased a physical good but has a dispute. But with digital goods you can just tell the seller to eat it (digital good, no actual cost loss)
- sounders 13y agoGoogle never had great customer service for this product. There were less than five people (customers often called this out since they would submit multiple help tickets and the same people would respond) and they never wanted to devote money to better customer service since the product wasn't maintained. Thus companies didn't want to adopt a below par product with bad customer service compounding the problem.
- badclient 13y agoI think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.
- devx 13y agoAgreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.
- sounders 13y agoAs a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).
- jrochkind1 13y ago> After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. That describes so many Google services. Some live on anyway, because for whatever reasons they meet Google's interests to keep running (Google Books). Some don't.
- sdfjkl 13y agoWhich prompts the question - should you bother signing up for Google Wallet (if applicable, i.e. digital goods only). Since that may just end up suffering the same fate.
- msvan 13y agoI think it's safe to say that Google will not be getting out of payments any time soon. Wallet is already tied into the enormous Play Store, so they certainly have a healthy userbase, and seeing as Google primarily is a digital services company it makes more sense for them to not target physical goods.
- mh- 13y agoI don't think one should read much into them needing Wallet internally. Google needing to accept credit card transactions for the Play Store is almost tangential to the service: offering a supported API to 3rd party merchant-users for processing digital goods transactions. The latter involves risk assessment, underwriting, customer support, maintaining card association/acquirer relationships, so on.
- StavrosK 13y agoHow inconvenienced will you be if they shut it down? It's not like the entire world will just move to it right away and forget about cash.
- jfoster 13y agoWallet supports month-to-month subscriptions. If Wallet shuts down without those subscribers being migrated to something else, that could be very damaging to a company.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- velodrome 13y agoNo, they gave plenty of time (6 months). It was announced on May 20, 2013. http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-update-to-google-checkout-for.html http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-update-to-goog...
- jmillikin 13y agoThe shutdown of checkout was announced in May. Announcement: http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-update-to-google-checkout-for.html http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-update-to-goog... HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447
- wheaties 13y agoI'd use Balanced Payments over the others. Great bunch of people, good customer support to the point of almost telling you how to write the code line by line, and well, dunno what else to say.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joeblau 13y agoWhile this seems bad from the title, it's actually pretty good. They are consolidating redundant systems into one system: Google Wallet.
- DanBC 13y agoBut Google wallet can't be used if you sell physical things.
- hrkristian 13y agoYet... I'm Norwegian so the Play Store only contains apps, as such I have no idea if ordering Nexus devices means using Google Wallet or something else entirely, what's the deal there?
- traviscj 13y agoMake an app for ordering an item, then? Or go meta: make an app which makes apps for ordering an item.
- kyledrake 13y agoIf you think Google shuts down APIs this quickly and casually now, wait until after the stock market bubble bursts.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago+1 I agree, and not just concerning Google. That said, Google seems to be aiming at increasing revenue by concentrating on fewer things, but from what I read about Google Ventures, Google car, etc., they still are placing long bets. I blogged a year ago about 4 or 5 Google canclled services that inconvenienced my customers and/or me.
- muzz 13y agoThis is old news from months ago. The Nov 20 date was mentioned back in May: http://www.slashgear.com/google-checkout-to-be-retired-november-20-20282862/ http://www.slashgear.com/google-checkout-to-be-retired-novem...
- jonknee 13y agoThis will have no noticeable effect on quarterly results. Same for other notable shutdowns like Google Reader or any of the various APIs shuttered in 2011 (Translate, Finance, Code Search, etc etc).
- JohnBooty 13y agoI can't imagine ever building something that relies on a Google service at this point. There is a lot of collateral damage when they do things like this, damage that hurts them when even when it comes to developers like me who've never written a single line of code that integrates with Google Checkout.
- przemelek 13y agoYeah, but how many business was using Google Checkout as only method of payment? This decision will hurt only those businesses. Rest of businesses using Google Checkout will remove one of payments method. Not a big deal, and we may guess that this method was probably not so popular already.
- unreal37 13y agoI had a client that used Google Checkout as the only method of payment. It's not rare. It is a mom & pop (truly) web site selling products online.
- Moto7451 13y agoIndeed. I did a similar setup years and years ago for a mom and pop shop (well before Braintree and Stripe) and I had to choose between Paypal and Google Checkout. Glad I set them up with Paypal.
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- spoiledtechie 13y agoMy startup for a time being was only using Google Checkout. Here lies the problem. Can't trust Google with building APIs when they reorganize. This is surprising to me, but I wonder if Google Maps could close down....
- nsh1991 13y agoi think square has come up with a very good idea thats going to change the payment systems
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y agoDon't worry, Google will buy them and shut them down too.
- hnriot 13y agoWhy would you think that? It's not like Dorsey needs the money, Square are doing genuinely innovative things and I very much doubt they would be interested in selling to BigCorp.
- jusben1369 13y agoWhen you take that much VC money you either have to IPO or get acquired by BigCorp. I doubt given Square's land grab that their underlying financials are very attractive so that would rule out IPO for a long time. So.....
- tedks 13y agoCheckout isn't mentioned on Gwern's predictions for google product closure: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns I hope he updates the page now that we have this additional data point, I'd love to see how his predictions performed.
- mortehu 13y agoThat's because his post is newer than the announcement that Checkout would close. It was probably in his "Dead products" list.
- gwern 13y agoIt's actually in the followup list. I added it 152 days ago (21 May 2013) when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 hit HN announcing the closure of Checkout in November, but that apparently was after I closed down data collection so I could finalize the analysis. (Wow, did I finish that analysis that long ago?) From my notes, I'm confused about how to treat it. The discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 among various HNers suggests that it's sorta like Checkout is becoming Google Wallet, but also sorta not, so I'm not sure whether to consider this one of the transition/renamed products or whether Checkout was killed and Wallet happens to have some similar functionality.
- anderspetersson 13y agoGoogle Checkout has been depreciated since May. It's not like this come as a suprise.
- jrochkind1 13y agothe word is 'deprecated'. 'depreciated' is a different word.
- seldo 13y ago<3
- pawn 13y agoI'm still annoyed that iGoogle is going away. I've tried some alternatives and still haven't found one I like as well. And now it reminds me every day that its going away. Ugh.
- marban 13y agoWhich parts of iGoogle (fragments) did you actually use?
- pawn 13y agoI use it mostly for RSS feeds, which come in a surprising variety of formats that not all of iGoogle's would-be replacers can handle. I also have a weather app, the Gmail app, and I like that I can read at least a portion of some stories directly within it without going to the website.
- fotcorn 13y agoI moved to http://www.protopage.com http://www.protopage.com which is very similar to iGoogle.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- baldfat 13y agoWOW and it is right in the middle of the Christmas RUSH! Never Depend on Google!
- tlogan 13y agoI know that a significant set of people here are saying that this is "end of Google". Actually, this is "beginning of Google". Google must focus on things they are best at: advertisement. The problem with their approach of having many half finished products that they were actually helping competition: they were discovering and validating market which is then captured by smaller companies. And my prediction is that the following Google products will probably die out soon: * Google App Engine - competition is improving at rapid pace and it is hard to keep up without focus. * Google Blogger - they will probably just make something similar under Google+ * Google Groups Probably there is more... but these are the one I see.
- marban 13y agoApp Engine — are you serious? New releases every few weeks, quite a few innovations technology-wise and essentially no freeriders. Also, I don't see a lot of competition in terms of equivalent solutions; if at all.
- tlogan 13y agoI can be wrong about App Engine. Here is my reasoning... I think App Engine does not fit nicely into Google's grand vision: which is mobile, social, and search for advertising purposes. So they need to be become profitable soon or they will be shut down. However they lack enterprise customers and without enterprise and corporate customers it very hard to make things profitable.
- tonfa 13y agoAre there any public information about whether appengine is profitable? Since the pricing change I'd expect most of their customers to be corporate.
- dragonwriter 13y agoAppEngine and, really, all the "Cloud Platform" services from Google are a way to directly monetize the infrastructure that also supports Google's own applications. As such, if they are pricing them above the marginal hardware and support costs they are profitable, since the fixed costs are costs Google bears whether or not it offers them as an external service.
- abritishguy 13y agoThis isn't "news", I was notified months ago.
- skore 13y agoThis actually solves a problem for me. For a long time, "finish Google Checkout recurring billing integration" was on my todo list. Just didn't get to it due to limited time and confusing documentation. Now I can simply close that ticket.
- Pxtl 13y agoTo be fair, even PayPal screws up recurring billing.
- skore 13y agoAfter having integrated nearly a hundred payment services: To be fair, recurring billing is hard.
- chaz 13y agoCare to share an opinion on who does it best? Or least worst?
- skore 13y agoCan't really pick a best. The reason why I write that recurring billing is hard is because the business cases vary so widely, so the answer is usually: It depends (on your location, userbase, what you're selling...). I started out writing a couple of integrations and you think "hey, why are there so many processors, that's unnecessary!". And then you do a couple dozen and you start to see the picture. I CAN definitely tell you how to spot the worst, though. In general, when you read the documentation and get the creeping feeling like the API was written for one big client (and their weird business logic) and then they just packaged it up and resold it, badly. Funnily enough, Google Checkout seemed to be like that to me - for instance, usually you have two things to specify: Time unit and amount of your billing cycle, like "recur every 4 days". Google Checkout didn't do that, no no, much too simple. They only had a time unit - one of: daily, weekly, semi_monthly, monthly, every_two_months, quarterly, yearly. And that's not the most complex "let us structure time awkwardly" example I have seen over the years. Other services only allow for "days" as time unit and you have to figure out a way to do monthly billing that doesn't just keep running away. My favorite so far was the one where it's basically "day, week, month, quarter, half-year and year". The values for that? D, W, M, Q, 6, Y. Can't make this stuff up. Other red flags: No English documentation, no public documentation, documentation that specifies variables without data types, unsafe notification functions (not even a shared secret) or downright exotic "security" (I have seen black-box .dll files distributed as security callbacks... oh the horror)... I could go on.
- ck2 13y agoDidn't google give out millions in coupons for using their checkout last holiday season? (maybe it was 2011)
- muzz 13y agoThis is nothing new, the Nov 20 date was well-known back in May: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/google-checkout-for-merchants-to-be-retired-on-nov-20/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/google-checkout-for-merch...
- kunai 13y agoWhile Checkout was deprecated for months, this marks the fourth in several huge shutdowns by Google. Reader, iGoogle, AOSP, and now Checkout. Not to mention their 3E mantra with companies like Sparrow and QuickOffice. Is there any way that Google can even be thought of as not evil anymore? I'm slowly shifting everything away from Google. I'm using an iPhone 3G as my main smartphone; switched to DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and have switched my email to private hosting for anything confidential and Outlook for public email. There's really nothing they could do, good or bad, to get me back at this point. They've proven, time and time again, that they don't care about the customer, and frankly, I'm tired of it.
- DigitalSea 13y agoGoogle are generating a lot of uncertainty in their product offerings lately. To innovate you need to know when to call it quits and move onto something else. It's quite clear Google Checkout wasn't the success that Google had hoped it would be and are closing it down to divert resources and cash somewhere else where it might be better utilised. People will complain about this situation, but would you rather Google kept a service running just to appease a few die-hards when it's probably costing them money? We need stronger and tougher competition in the online payments space. Paypal seriously can't be the only globally working payment and checkout substitute around, maybe Google has a similar service that's stronger and more feature packed up their sleeves? I hope so.
- adamb_ 13y agoIf this was because checkout was a commercial failure they need to make that public knowledge. Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering. I'm specifically thinking of Google Voice & Keep.
- jrochkind1 13y agoHow would it help you to know that it was a commercial failure? How would knowing that change your conclusion that you can't rely on Google products?
- rsynnott 13y ago> Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering. Given history, yeah, you don't want to be seriously dependent on anything non-core.
- adamb_ 13y agoPersonally, I would find it understandable if Google closed checkout because they failed to generate solid profits from it. I saw only after my comment that checkout was deprecated in part because they have another existing product in the same space, Google wallet.
- Thiz 13y agoIt will be replaced by 'Google Bitcoin'.
- coldcode 13y agoThe only thing Google will never shut down is ads.
- jusben1369 13y agoIf you want large companies to innovate (and I do) you can't complain bitterly if they fail and retire a product or service in this way (which as others have noted included a lot of notice) The flip side is big companies won't innovate or release anything new. "No way! Have you seen how people complain if we have to close it down? Not worth taking the chance of all that bitching" P.S It's kind of funny that one of the alternatives they pushed at the time of the initial announcement was Braintree who then went on to be acquired by PayPal. Shows you how fluid/active this space is.
- minikites 13y agoSo why not do it faster to avoid people relying on the service for many years? Set a private internal deadline of 6 months or a year, then if it's not as successful as your initial goal, kill it then, not seven years later, after tons of people have come to rely on it.
- jusben1369 13y agoAgain you're just craving this predictability and risk reduction which is at loggerheads of taking chances and entering new markets.
- laaph 13y agoPartly because it is hard to operate in an economy that is far too nimble. One of the reasons that it is hard to sell to a large businesses as a small business is that it is quite likely that you will go out of business - and that will cost them a lot of time and money to reconfigure if that happens. Most components designed to be included in a larger product for sale will be available from another manufacturer, aka "second source". This is in case the first company goes out of business. Unfortunately, this practice does not seem to have made it to the software world, and so when a company goes out of business, your existing working solution no longer exists, and you will have to scramble to find another one (or go out of business yourself, if you depended on that functionality).
- talles 13y agoWhat is the difference between google wallet and google checkout again?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bcx 13y agoThis is insanely bad timing. They should shut it down in January of 2014 after all the E-commerce retailers make all their money. No one in Ecommerce wants to touch their tech stack during the only quarter that matters to them. [edit] Apparently the shutdown was announced in May. Regardless, it probably would have been better to shut it down in September, than right before Cyber Monday.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- seldo 13y agoI think the difference between "old Google" and "current Google" is that old Google would have been honest and said "the closest available equivalents are Paypal and Amazon Payments". Instead the migration partnership (presumably with a rev share) is Braintree, which while capable is not really the same sort of product. It sucks to have to close things down, but sometimes you do, and they gave everybody 6+ months of notice to migrate back in May, but being disingenuous about the best alternative is mealy-mouthed and "un-Googly".
- clarky07 13y agoI'm just starting a new SaaS project. Google was immediately checked off as a source of anything for the project as it is too hard to know if the service will exist in a year.
- azifali 13y agoThanks for eating up more than $3000 from my company, Google Checkout.
- integricho 13y agoThere are many webdev learning books that used Google Checkout and built an app using their service as an example.. It will be fun for people reading the book after a couple of years about a service that doesn't exists anymore, it'll be like reading some sacred scrolls from times forgotten by today's humans..
- blinks 13y agoSpecifically: * Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods * Merchants selling through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) will be unaffected * Merchants selling physical goods will need to switch to third-party alternatives (see below) -- https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449 https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449