Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don't use Google Checkout for your business

http://www.slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-than-paypal-don-t-use-google-checkout-for-your-business

by ahoyhere • 17 years ago

400 150 17 years ago

sgrove2• 17 years ago

Regardless of whether or not this is true, it's a very damaging piece for google not to respond to. After reading it, I'm very hesitant to use their checkout service - it simply isn't worth the risk.

Hopefully google can step away from their usual "no-comment" ethos and explain a bit about their termination process, and how they try to be fair. If not, this will undoubtedly show up on searches for their checkout service, and lead quite a few people away from it.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

it was only created today, I'm sure once this makes its rounds on digg/reddit/twitter etc, he'll get some clarification

bprater• 17 years ago

Ms. Hoy is a gal! :)

moe• 17 years ago

I'm also quite surprised to hear this about google (of all companies), considering their Do-No-Evil claim.

Terminating accounts without notice would be such an obvious and unnecessary evil that I wonder whether perhaps the mail just got lost in this particular case?

Still, providing no obvious contact info for inquiries is a showstopper either way. How am I supposed to trust someone with my money when that someone isn't even willing to talk to me in case of problems?

sgrove2• 17 years ago

Yeah, dealing with money is a tricky business, and I could understand them being very harsh about terminating accounts. But there must be some contact and process of winding things down (getting the money owed from google, etc.). Just like you said - You can't trust someone unwilling to talk to you if there's a problem.

But then this is google, and they've worked hard to automate things more than any other company. In some cases, perhaps they've automated things farther than their technology is ready to take them.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

I've always viewed the 'Do No Evil' mantra in the same vein as the 'Don't think of a pink elephant dancing the salsa in your pyjamas'.

What are you thinking of right now?

[Edit] Seriously. If you go to work everyday and someone tells you to 'Do No Evil', my bet is that you'll be thinking more about Evil (even just to avoid it) than you will about Good. Add that to human filters like uncertainty, laziness, or optimism, and that 'evil' gets released into the world. As a buzz phrase 2001, it was great; as a corporate mantra 2009, it's biting them on the ass.

aditya2• 17 years ago

It will not show up on searches if they own the search engine!! ;)

breck3• 17 years ago

I believe it because it happened to me as well.

A year or two ago I used Google Checkout for an online product which sold a few hundred dollars worth. I got a couple of emails from Google saying to "Make sure to ship the products" or something like that. Since they were virtual goods, I didn't bother to go to Google Checkout and click "Shipped" or whatever.

Fast forward about a year, and I log in to Google Checkout to a message that says "Your account has been closed. We can't tell you why. There is no appeal".

The funniest part was I was trying to BUY something with Google Checkout.

I think it's bad practice to not tell someone why their account was closed. I understand if it was because I never clicked "Shipped" or whatever, but I don't even know if that's the reason.

Luckily there are alternatives to Google Checkout. I just wish Google treated their customers nicer. Especially because myself and my company spend over six figures a year on AdWords.

spoiledtechie• 17 years ago

Ditto. Ditto Ditto. Sorry, but they did it to me. Was only $80.00, but Ditto.

run4yourlives8• 17 years ago

Wow. Memo to self - Avoid having business dealings with google if there are alternatives.

michaelneale2• 17 years ago

On a previous posting here at HN I noticed comments about google checkout (in comparison to other ones) which has already scared me off ever using it - there is still a lot of choice out there, when it comes to money, you want a human to talk to.

goodkarma• 17 years ago

If Google explained their termination process for Google Checkout, would that mean they also have to explain their termination process for Adsense?

andreyf8• 17 years ago

Regardless of whether or not this is true ... it simply isn't worth the risk

I never understood this mentality... can you explain how you reached this conclusion?

eli5• 17 years ago

You make it seem like this is a breaking new story. It's not. There are complaints about this going back years.

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+checkout+closed+accoun...

It's also pretty typical for a one-on-one interactions with Google. Check out all the people who had their AdSense accounts frozen for "click fraud" with no recourse or detailed explanation.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

How has Google avoided class action law suits?

Wiping out hundreds of dollars for who knows how many users, at some point doesn't that become worthwhile for a class action attorney to pursue?

ryanwaggoner6• 17 years ago

You can't have an attorney represent you in small claims court, but can someone else file and appear on your behalf? If so, perhaps someone in the Bay Area should setup a company that helps people sue Google in small claims court. Charge a couple hundred bucks or something.

briansmith5• 17 years ago

No, you cannot represent somebody else in small claims court, even if you are a licensed attorney. The plaintiff and the defendant must represent themselves. If either one is a corporation, then an employee of the corporation (not a hired lawyer or consultant) must represent the corporation.

ryanwaggoner6• 17 years ago

Not disagreeing, but do you have a source? Also, what if one of the parties is bedridden or something?

tjic• 17 years ago

> You can't have an attorney represent you in small claims court

Laws vary by state.

In Massachusetts, you CAN have an attorney.

briansmith5• 17 years ago

Why not just sue them in your own local small claims court? You are more likely to win by default.

ryanwaggoner6• 17 years ago

You're usually required to file in the defendant's court, and with good reason. The judge will likely toss the case out unless you have a really good reason for not filing here.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

I would sue them if it made business sense. But I can't file in small claims court in the right district, and it would end up costing me much more in time and effort to recover the money.

Which is probably why you don't hear about people suing them all the time.

Which is why I wrote about it, instead.

briansmith5• 17 years ago

What do you mean by "the right district"? You don't have to file the claim in Google's juristiction; you can file in your own juristiction.

teej• 17 years ago

I don't think ahoyhere lives in a US jurisdiction.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

I don't believe thats true. Almost any terms of service agreement specifies that any lawsuit takes place in the company's jurisdiction. Read any credit card contract, and you'll see that if you sue, you gotta go up to Delaware.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

I am an American citizen with a US business (Delaware inc.), living in Austria.

And I'd probably have to sue in CA, as the other commentor points out. Most agreements do specify which districts. Or specify arbitration.

jasonwatkinspdx• 17 years ago

The only way a lawsuit would happen is if someone gets interested in a class action lawsuit. That's a bit of a long shot, but this thread helps. You could do the online petition thing too to start documenting the number of people screwed this way.

lecha• 17 years ago

Is there anything you think you were doing that may be interpreted as fraud?

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Doubt it. We were selling an ebook package (automated digital delivery) about JavaScript performance.

ryanwaggoner6• 17 years ago

Did you sing the appropriate praises of Chrome with regard to JS performance?

briansmith5• 17 years ago

Is it possible that people paid for the book, and then some kind of technical issue prevented them from being able to download the book? I am also selling digital content and this is my #1 concern regarding payment processing.

Now, I am using PayPal's authorize-and-settle function. I don't settle the transaction until I see in my logs that the user has downloaded the item. If more than a few hours has passed then I email the customer and ask them if they are having some kind of problem with the download.

lsb2• 17 years ago

Put the ebook up on Lulu / CreateSpace / Cafepress and keep selling it, at slightly lower margins?

DenisM4• 17 years ago

From selling apps through iPhone app store - there are always people who can't figure something out and instead of contacting the seller they lash out in comments and then leave without a trace. Sometimes they just give you a one-star and leave and you have no idea why. Happens all the time, could have happened to you as well.

Do what briansmith suggests, you just can't be too cautious.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Seems my blog engine pooped the bed.

Here's the raw (markdown) text:

http://gist.github.com/raw/86239/990e88415f3b2cd1efb909893e3...

markm• 17 years ago

Not having the chance to try Google Checkout as a Canadian merchant (it wasn't available to Canadian merchants at the time we made our payment solution decision), I'm reminded of a very early quote from Max Levchin when he discusses one of the first years after Paypal launched.

The quote attributed almost the entire first year of Paypal to fraud. Running and managing 3 CPA campaigns I can now understand why, it seems like everyone with a (stolen) credit card tries to extract the money through online scams.

It should have been clearly visible at the time that choosing Google Checkout would have been a risky decision as a merchant because Google was going to inevitably go through some of the same growing pains. Luckily for us, we dodged that bullet - but by no means is payment integration and fraud detection easy.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

At the risk of being a shameless karma whore, let me note that Levchin's interview in Founders At Work is great and includes a lot of discussion of this issue. Here's a quote that leaps out at me today:

LEVCHIN: It's one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision, because, in the end, it's people's money. You don't really want some computer saying "$2.00 for you, nothing for you." You need a human with a brain to say, "Hmm. This looks like fraud, but I really don't think it is."

wvenable• 17 years ago

I love using Google services: Search, Maps, Gmail, and so on but I've not seen any evidence that even have non-technical support staff. If you call, they can't direct you anywhere. It doesn't seem like a smart place to do business.

sgoraya2• 17 years ago

The Apps/Enterprise divsion has a support staff and they were helpful when I setup our domain email accts. and with our enterprise licensing of gMaps API.

mixmax2• 17 years ago

Google trusts algorithm, not people, and this is what gets them into potential PR disasters like this.

Whether the closing of the account was right or not doesn't really matter here, what does matter is that this doesn't convey trust in Google at all. The accountholder is left with no options, and money that has outright been stolen from him by Google - at least this is what the the rest of the world sees.

The interesting thing here is that any competent PR or HR person would be able to tell you that this code of conduct was a PR disaster waiting to happen, but apparently the engineers got the last word.

It's OK to do regression testing on which words in a CV makes you a potential succesfu hire based on past history (which Google does), but it's not OK to let it replace the hiring process completely.

That's what seems to have hapened here. Google should hire some good people-people. They need it.

DenisM4• 17 years ago

How can you recognize that you have a "people problem" if you and your coworkers are not "people-people" to start with? This is not a simple problem.

mixmax2• 17 years ago

Very very good point.

Basically it's the same as non-hackers not being able to recognise good hackers.

run4yourlives8• 17 years ago

Hire people that can, specifically for that purpose.

Just like a founder that recognizes he/she isn't good at design specifically seeks that skillset in others.

netsp3• 17 years ago

In retrospect, this is a bad business for Google to have gotten into for that reason. They are not good with the type of problems that come up.

I was using paypal the other day & thinking the same thing about them. I came to the conclusion that they never would have made it today. Paypal is harder to use & more confusing then the Banks' online banking platforms. In a way, that's a huge missed opportunity. If they were the super-easy-to-use-and-understand-without-feeling-dumb type of company, they might have taken a stab at being an online bank.

They did succeed because the technology was the key. From reports, the technology was just so far ahead of anyone else' that nothing else mattered.

Google is not in that boat. There are all sorts of solutions and they all work. It's not adwords where "it's my way or the high way".

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

One obvious lesson here is "read your TOS agreements carefully." In this case, Google seems to reserve for itself rights that most people would find absurd. It's too bad it took an incident like this to publicize them.

run4yourlives8• 17 years ago

You can't reserve rights that violate the law. Just because a lawyer writes it in a TOS doesn't make it valid.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Reread that section that they cite again.

It says they can "restrict access to Service," not that they can take my money. It doesn't lay out reclaiming or claiming funds at all.

And, as the other commentor says, you cannot opt out of most provided-by-law rights.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

If google wants to close accounts, that's their right, it's not evil (though it may be a good reason to choose their competitor), but they should pay out the balance on the account first!!

sgoraya2• 17 years ago

Its evil since they did not give any prior notice AND are witholding monies.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

My statement says X is not evil but Y is. Then you replied saying the combination of an aspect of X, with Y, is evil.

Your reply is consistent with my statement, not contradictory, and is indeed a weaker statement. I say Y is wrong straight out, but you only criticize it in the presence of something else.

Yet you seem angrier than me, e.g. the CAPS, and you presented your comment as being about how Google is more evil than I said. So you or I must be misunderstanding something here.

berrow• 17 years ago

This sounds like the google algorithm for account termination has some hair-trigger based on chargebacks. It basically means that a disgruntled (or just plain vindictive) customer can take you out on a whim regardless of the truth of the claim. The google model is not based on wetware or 'operators standing by'. It is based on arrays of machines running code that will spit out notifications (if their fraud alert is triggered) that are designed to discourage you from ever calling. There isn't anyone back there. In this case you get what you pay for and your business is just hanging in the breeze.

jedberg• 17 years ago

I used to work with the anti-fraud folks at PayPal. Most of them jumped ship to Google about 2 years ago. PayPal was data driven, but required a human to verify the results. Google is simply data driven. That should help explain why they seem even worse than PayPal.

netsp3• 17 years ago

I would have guessed that if you wanted to create a paypal for the next ten years you would want to go the opposite direction on the technology >> people friendliness continuum.

There is a lot to be done on making payment online painless & friendly. There is lots to be done in making accepting money easier and friendlier. There is even more to be done in making managing money cleverly easy.

I'm not sure how much work is still to be done on making those things safe & fraud proof. That happens less publicly. Could be a lot to do. But I suspect that the projectile in the other direction.

dschobel2• 17 years ago

Terrible customer service makes them evil?

You have my full sympathies and it's a crappy situation but that has got to be the most banal version of evil I've ever heard of.

nomoresecrets• 17 years ago

Did you miss the part where they kept the client's money, with no explanation whatsoever, and the client's only recompense is to sue Google, probably costing more money in the end?

For a lot of people, that's close to some definition of evil at any rate. Either that or incompetence. But when it comes to money, most people view incompetence that ends up with their money being stolen as pretty much the same as evil.

blurry• 17 years ago

"Don't be evil" is google's corporate motto. I believe that's what she was referring to.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Right in one.

dschobel2• 17 years ago

again, karma be damned, terrible customer service is an incredibly limp definition of evil.

but by all means, enjoy the hyperbole. woe is the author, etc etc

krschultz2• 17 years ago

$2300 is not a small number to me if its basically flushed down a toilet

davidmurphy• 17 years ago

Wow. I will NEVER, ever use Google Checkout after reading this -- unless I see a very, very, very, VERY convincing response from Google.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

Why not?

-or-

Have you ever driven in a car? What do you suppose is more likely - a false positive in Google's fraud detection, or dying in a car accident?

jsackmann• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting this. Since I haven't seen any positive comments about Checkout in the comments, so far, I figured I'd chime in.

I've been using Checkout since about January 2007 to sell digital resources through my site gmathacks.com. In that time, I've had thousands of purchases through Checkout with gross sales well over $100k.

Having had problems with PayPal before (not with this business, but a previous one), I was careful from the outset -- I generally err on the side of refunding people, I follow Checkout's procedure (click the "shipped" button, even though it's a digital product, etc.) to a "t," and I do the best I can with customer service in general.

My experience has, quite simply, been great. Checkout's algorithm seems to reject some purchasers more readily than other systems do (often, I think, because their IP doesn't match the country in their credit card address), which is better than a recent experience of mine through PayPal, when a $200 purchase was reversed weeks later because of a fraud concern. (Which turned out to be false.)

All the while, the fees charged have been way cheaper than PayPal's. (This, unfortunately, is changing. Depending on your monthly sales, Checkout fees are going up as much as 40% in the next month or two.)

I will say that little has happened to turn Checkout against me -- in 2+ years, my chargeback rate is just a shade over 0.1%. And as noted, I'm aware of some of the risks, so I've trod carefully.

All of this certainly isn't a defense for Checkout's (non-existent?) customer service and apparently faulty algorithms. But...while I'm glad to be aware of situations like this, I'll continue to happily use Checkout and recommend to others that they do the same.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

Ok, now we have two self-selected samples of experiences with Google checkout.

While I appreciate your post, I'd like to point out that statistically speaking, we still have learned nothing about the risk/benefits associated with using Google checkout. sigh

dpapathanasiou• 17 years ago

You're right.

I wonder why Google closed the account: was it that b/c she never clicked "Shipped" to any of the orders and so Google's algorithm thought the account fraudulent, or was there another reason?

If Google doesn't come clean on the reason, it's going to lose a lot of future customers.

abstractwater• 17 years ago

When things can go as bad as in the Slash7 story, statistics totally lose their importance in my opinion. I will never ever pay for a service knowing that it may turn on me like that.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

In defense of Google, they've been losing money on Checkout from day 1. Everyone knew (or should have known) they would have to raise rates eventually. They've been low to try to convince people to get used to using Checkout. It hasn't actually worked very well and I'm guessing the Checkout folks would rather continue to lose money to gain customers, but with the belt-tightening at Google I guess they've got to prove they're a worthwhile business to have on the books.

pg2• 17 years ago

The general implications of this are quite interesting. It means you can compete with Google at anything where really good customer service is an advantage, because the concept of customer service (except at such low granularity as generating good, fast search results) is so alien to their culture.

dmh2000• 17 years ago

there are already lots of credit card processors that compete on service. they cost more to use (both in fees and your labor to setup). people buy on cost then wonder why their cheaper solution isn't as good as the pricier one. like people who buy the cheapest airline ticket then gripe that the food wasn't good. you get what you pay for.

davidw• 17 years ago

IMO, this is a problem with many things - it's very easy to focus on that which is quantifiable, and ignore the fuzzier stuff. For instance, I did a comparison of Linode and Slicehost which has proved quite popular, but one of the things I stated up front was that while it's possible to measure costs and things like memory and disk, it's not really possible to easily compare service, especially as for the most part, hosting is invisible, and service only becomes critical in an emergency.

Economics in general suffers from this problem too. It's easy to quantify things related to money, but much more difficult to deal with the benefits from more abstract things.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

That's right in general, but a payment processor cutting off the service without notice or explanation isn't comparable to bad food on a cheapo flight. It's more like offloading passengers during a stopover in Mogadishu.

dhimes2• 17 years ago

Even, for a small company, something like adwords. The problem I have with AW is that if I change the wording of an ad (say, to add the price, or change the price or other "trivial" changes), I have to wait DAYS for the ads to run. I know others who say their changes take effect within a few minutes. I get no direct answer other than "we try to treat all of our customers equally."

I think I draw a flag because I sell educational software, and they want to make sure that I'm not selling homework answers or term papers (or whatever they are worried about). I would benefit from some sort of flag that says they've checked me out N times, I'm probably good for the N+1st time (with maybe random checks afterwords). Or let the ads run and check concurrently.

For example, I shop sometimes in a supermarket that lets me scan the items with a handheld scanner and pay at a self-checkout lane. When I first started doing it, I was randomly (?--I assume) audited fairly frequently. But after very many (over 8 months maybe?) honest check-outs, I haven't been audited in at least two months. It seems I've earned some trust, and I find myself shopping there more because of the convenience.

Putting some sort of trust-factor into Adwords would be useful for me. Alternatively, somebody that could get me the returns that Adwords can (big hurdle) but puts in a trust factor would get my attention.

aristus3• 17 years ago

That's how we kicked their (and Yahoo's, and MSN's) ass in Latin America for search advertising. We spoke the languages, answered the phone, answered emails, dealt with icky non-US forms of payment, walked people through their first ad campaigns, etc.

herdrick• 17 years ago

Who is 'we'?

andreyf8• 17 years ago

I think you can generalize this to say "you can compete with companies that focus on scaling to large markets of X by providing services for X which don't scale".

netsp3• 17 years ago

I think it might be useful to generalize that even more. Google are good with aggregate. When problems are granular they are not.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

I don't get it -

aggregate (n): a sum total of many heterogenous things taken together

granular (adj): composed of or covered with relatively large particles

You mean that Google provides services that scale - like a fully automated checkout system, and doesn't provide services that don't scale - like personal support. I don't know if it'll end up being a wise one, but it's certainly an interesting business decision they've made...

DenisM4• 17 years ago

Replace Google with most large Co's out there and the argument is still valid.

gaius• 17 years ago

Name me a traditional payment processor (e.g. a bank) that can just walk away with your money and you have no means of recourse.

nopinsight• 17 years ago

There is some trade-off between efficiency and friendliness, as long as friendliness requires some real human services (which is likely the case for the foreseeable future). Of course, there is definitely room to provide more of both, but trade-off exists nonetheless.

When a typical merchant signs up for a service, she'd look first for the expenses involved. If a non-free service springs up even with a great customer service, there is little chance they will get enough scale to compete successfully in the long run. As long as most merchants don't have big problems with mostly automated (and less friendly) services like this, Web-based payment services will stick to this free model.

That's an issue with this 'free' economy. Nothing is really free. We've collectively given up human customer service to get these 'free' services.

lsb2• 17 years ago

It sounds like they make decisions when confronted with heaps of data. A billion searches? Sure, we can figure out what worked & what didn't. Versus a few dissatisfied customers, orders of magnitude too small to train models on.

Also, given that engineers have to design their services to scale well, perhaps the answer is that we just don't know how to build cheap customer service yet? Perhaps they need a Mechanical Turk like interface for CSRs.

eli5• 17 years ago

It's not just "dissatisfied customers." It's any customers at all.

I dare you to try to get an answer from Google about how your site is indexed, or about how to accomplish something in analytics. There are several Google products where the only support option available is to post in a Google Support Group and pray that an engineer responds.

It's pretty frustrating.

andomar• 17 years ago

Treating 1 out of 10.000 customers badly is hard to avoid.

chanux2• 17 years ago

But if you are a company (a good one), you should have a backup plan to help that 1 user.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

And what would you suggest that backup plan should be? Keep in mind that the false positive rate is probably about 1 out of 100, and fraudsters are going to get really big payouts if they figure out a way around your backup plan.

mauricio2• 17 years ago

Google seems to generally ignore customer support altogether.

My company used to pay $750/yr for their anti-spam enterprise scanning package they sell as a separate product from Google Apps. When I contacted them, via email, about a bug I had found, they said email support was only available to customers that spend $1000/yr or more. They sent me a link to their Google forums...

mauricio2• 17 years ago

Doesn't Google even use script.aculo.us themselves?

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

PayPal killed lots of accounts to fight fraud, pissing off lots of people. I think payments makes for an adversarial business, making customer support harder.

10ren• 17 years ago

Google check-out completes their advertising chain management, enabling assessable advertising. Instead of pay-per-click, you can pay-per-pay. It really is a fantastic concept for trying to optimize marketing automatically.

Problem: they suck at it.

So... this function really helps their mission, but they can't do it. Therefore, they should outsource this function, or spin off a startup so that it can operate on the values needed for success in it.

2cool• 17 years ago

don't be evil

chanux2• 17 years ago

Google: Don't show evil.

mwexler• 17 years ago

Matt Cutts responded in the comments that he will take a look at it. I guess this teaches us that the only way to get help from Google is to blog, get it picked up by the aggregators, get a "celebrity" blogger to notice, and hope he follows through. That's not encouraging.

Of course, many big companies have the same problems... so, can we propose a better way without it involving call centers or other massive human investment? Some human investment is great, but any solution involving "hire lots of people to help" won't fly.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Yes, I saw that this morning. (Was out and about yesterday.)

For my follow up, I was planning to say essentially what you've said:

If it takes a massive blog publicity campaign to get somebody to look into it, there's still something rotten in Denmark. (Aaaand... nobody's contacted me about the $2k from the Scriptaculous Adsense money.)

eli5• 17 years ago

Google has always had remarkably bad customer service with all their products. I'm not really sure how they get away with it.

Of course, paypal is pretty bad too, so if there's are the only two options you're considering, it's probably a wash.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Paypal's gotten a lot better. In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers (I'll count myself in that group), and probably because of the govt stepping in and forcing them to act like the financial institution that they are.

You can call PayPal. There are actual people. They may be stubborn, but they are there. You can find out why your account is closed. And there are precedents.

Google Checkout: no contact. You can't call them. You can't email them. You can't appeal. No one, as far as I've been able to tell, is in charge of this beast.

eli5• 17 years ago

In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers

I think the federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of customers who had accounts frozen may have played a bigger role.

eli5• 17 years ago

Here are people complaining about this a year ago: http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-payouts/brows...

I think the lesson is, do your homework on researching partners -- don't just trust a brand name.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Or the lesson is, that the people who get screwed ought to be a lot more vocal about it to help other people in the future :)

I'm doing my part.

jseifer• 17 years ago

As of the time of this comment, typing "google paypal" in to Google search has this link as the #2 result. I'm wondering if that will put anyone off.

Freaky• 17 years ago

They sound exactly like PayPal. When they closed my account, I had about 100,000 successful payments, my own "personal account manager" and all that jazz. One day they noticed we had an adult section and closed our account without any warning and completely stonewalled any attempt to contact them. $200? Good for you, we lost about £1500.

At least when our Bank objected to our XXX section, they gave us time to do something about it. Of course, PayPal also didn't want quarter of a million in a bond to insure against chargebacks.

mbowles• 17 years ago

Very interesting...if Microsoft pulled something like this...every person and govt in the world would be screamin bloody murder.

ahoyhere13• 17 years ago

Brief update (will write more in depth later today):

Some Google person with no last name & a fake-sounding first name (Sophie?) wrote me a very impersonal, automated sounding email that said:

"During a recent review it has come to our attention that your merchant account ID amy@slash7.com was closed due to a technical error. We apologies for the inconvenience it might have caused. We have re-activated your account and you are eligible to receive payouts."

Riiight. A recent review. Guess that had nothing to do with the fact that you guys made this topic a front page news item.

So now I've got my $200. Hoo-ray.

But this is ridiculous. I don't care about the money. I will never use Google Checkout again, once my money is out.

And I plan to continue to agitate for them to improve their policies, because I know I'm not alone in being ripped off... I'm just more loudmouthed and vindictive than most people.

Also, no word at all on the over $2,000 USD that was in the script.aculo.us Adsense account.

That's Google essentially stealing from an open source project. I just can't believe it.

By the way... My thanks to all the people outside & especially inside of Google who have tried to look into this case to the best of their ability. I truly appreciate it.

The problem is that it's no one's fault that my account got closed, and therefore no one's responsibility to fix it, either.

elv• 17 years ago

holy shit "let us be evil"

and what if they delist you to claim your rights? time to turn to yahoo?

andreyf8• 17 years ago

Wee!

aditya2• 17 years ago

Intense. What has happened?

Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don't use Google Checkout for your business

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