I'll tell you why: Google Checkout is doing the same PCI kludge that we do at Dawdle. We only do the $1 authorization charges, and we get people screaming at u

I'll tell you why: Google Checkout is doing the same PCI kludge that we do at Dawdle. We only do the $1 authorization charges, and we get people screaming at us all the time. Users hate being "charged" for stuff that they didn't purchase, and lots of people check their stuff online frequently. But it turns out that you can't be PCI compliant if you store credit cards in distributed virtual servers (it violates the physical access tenet), so they can't store CCs. So you have to do an auth and then a reference transaction off of the auth.