a php developer weblog

A long awaited online payment tool from Google: checkout.google.com. Lightweight signup process; probably soon the integration to the personalised google homepage. Let's hope that customers trying to purchase with it will get more than the near-by image (api probably overloaded).

Although it is actually a direct attack on the eBay's PayPal C2B & B2C market of zillions of members, google tries to evade this and project the image of an adwords supplement. Merchants wouldn't need to dive into advertisment markets anymore, just rely on google base/froogle+gCheckout to complete a sale. With the base and now the checkout process, what they build is actually a world-wide eBay. All that's left (for now) to eBay/PayPal is the C2C market; a tough nut to crack.

To see where the two commissions meet, use this multi-equation online graphic tool and fill in the two equations: x*0.019+0.30;x*0.020+0.20 (paypal resp. google) then press Graph. You have to scroll quite a bit, but the answer is worth finding (unless you take it from somewhere else). Seems like Google is doing some long tail math in here, which raises the inner-geek attention.

as always, not to miss the Slashdot dissection
and some blogosphere waves.

Updated: the error screen might be caused by the fact that I live in europe; seems like the checkout tool is open only to the us.