Life is grand

Google Checkout has launched and I like it. It is not a direct PayPal competitor as some suggested but instead provides a checkout system for online stores and central place to store payment and delivery details for shoppers. Effectively Amazon could outsource their checkout steps to Google. You could then use your Google Account to buy products from Amazon.

This idea has been floated before but the problem was one of reputation. Google though just may have the reputation to make the idea finally work.

Derek Lakin also made a good point about Froogle. With just one more component (an order-placing system from Google to the store) we could buy directly through Froogle without ever going to the stores website. Google would aggregate multiple store products, show them through the flexible Froogle interface and let you buy through Google Checkout. A common ecommerce interface.

UPDATE

And in another move Google has half-launched Google Account Authentication which is easily described as Microsoft Passport by Google. It isn’t quite the same and Google isn’t even saying it is (they say it is just for add-on functionality to their existing services like GCal and GMail) but you can be sure some sites will use it like Passport. IrishEyes broke the news to me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 11:43 am and is filed under Google, Google Checkout, Passport, authentication, basket, checkout, ecommerce, froogle, identity, proucts, stores. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.