eBay: Only 14 Percent Pleased With Google Checkout

Jul 9, 2007 at 9:39am ET by Danny Sullivan

Readers will recall Google recently backing down from eBay in pushing Google Checkout against eBay’s PayPal. Google, eBay battle it out over online payments from Bloomberg is a good article shedding fresh light on how important PayPal is to eBay, to the degree that it would pull its ads from Google to protect something that produces one-quarter of its income. It also has eBay saying practically no one is pleased with Google Checkout, based on its own survey.

From the article:

Meanwhile, eBay’s PayPal service, which generated a fourth of the company’s revenue last year, has become increasingly important as auction sales growth slowed to 23 percent in the first quarter, half that in 2004.

The article also covers how eBay continues to reject Google Checkout as an “unproven” payment method:

“In the latest survey we did, only 14 percent of Google Checkout users were pleased with their experience,” Whitman said in the June 15 interview on “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” which aired on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. She said eBay may eventually use Google Checkout if more people are satisfied.

Of course, Valleywag notes how the same article has a JP Morgan survey finding that while only 19 percent rated Google Checkout good or better, PayPal itself still got a dismal score. It was higher than Google, but fewer than half — 44 percent — rated it good or better.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and can be followed on Twitter here.

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3 COMMENTS ON eBay: Only 14 Percent Pleased With Google Checkout

David, July 9th, 2007 at 3:09 pm ET:

What?! Checkout is fantastic - I’m trying to get most of my clients to work with Checkout - it’s seamless and I am in love with it so much I cancelled a costly (for me) merchant account.

PayPal has always come over as being cheap looking and sounding and I use it if I must

Someone must have their #s wrong…….

joe, July 9th, 2007 at 4:20 pm ET:

As a consumer, I hated Checkout — and so did almost about everybody (and I know quite a few of them!) who used it back then. Things may have improved now, but given how bad the experience was, I ain’t giving it a try ANYTIME soon!

Ruben Rodriguez, July 9th, 2007 at 9:08 pm ET:

I’ve seen several versions of this press release and none of them have included the list of questions that were asked.

I discovered that if you get ripped off by an Ebay seller and you used Google Checkout instead of Paypal, you’re on your own.

I’m not naive enough to believe that a sharp elbows company like Ebay is powerless to discipline its sellers solely because the buyer didn’t use all of Ebay’s services to complete the transaction.

Google shares some of the blame for these survey results too: I searched in vain on Google Checkout for a link to report the rip-off or to at least dispute the charge.

I ended up having to resolve the problem through my bank.

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