Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th

https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449

by tephra • 13 years ago

233 132 13 years ago

support.google.com

gcatalfamo2• 13 years ago

I'd say that signs of an imminent merge with Google Wallet were clearly visible throughout the year...

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Yeah, especially this:

May 20th, 2013 Last day to sign up for Google Checkout

alttab2• 13 years ago

Except they arent merging. Goolge is no longer sulporti g pyshical goods.

gcatalfamo2• 13 years ago

"Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods"

Except they are. But I'd say we are both correct.

aviraldg• 13 years ago

Scared, shocked and confused for a moment while I thought Google was shutting down Takeout (which would've been a huge step backward.) This is okay (it's been superseded by Google Wallet anyway.)

makomk• 13 years ago

It's apparently been superseded by Google Wallet for digital goods and discontinued with no replacement for everything else, if I'm reading the announcement right?

arkitaip• 13 years ago

---

No, Google is not offering a replacement processing solution for physical goods and services. We’ve partnered with three premier players in the payments industry to offer alternatives for your eCommerce needs. The links below will guide you to more detailed information about each offering, including negotiated discounts for Checkout users:

Payment Processing: Braintree Payments

Hosted storefront: Shopify

Email invoicing: Freshbooks

---

Increasingly often I'm associating Google with poor customer service, poor design and being indifferent to user worries when discontinuing products. Not sure they realize the harm they are causing to their brand, even in the eyes of people who don't actually use the affected products.

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Yeah, it hasn't threatened PayPal, but it seems I've seen the Google Checkout on quite a few merchant sites. I guess they all should have integrated Amazon Payments as their "non-PayPal PayPal" instead...

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Title switching to slightly less informative "Retiring Google Checkout Announcement" in 3, 2, 1...

paulhauggis• 13 years ago

wow, I'm glad I didn't use Google checkout for anything important..

nateberkopec• 13 years ago

This is probably because requestAutocomplete has been moved into Chrome Beta, and will probably feature tight Wallet integration.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/using-requestautocomplete

alttab2• 13 years ago

More likely was Checkout With Amazon.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

I don't think Checkout with Amazon has affected them at all. Checkout was closed to new signups since May 20th (from the article), and Wallet has been the digital-goods alternative for longer than that.

My guess would be that operating a physical goods processing company is a huge drain on the resource Google hates providing most: customer service.

Payment disputes are a pain, especially for physical goods. Some level of mediation is required when someone has purchased a physical good but has a dispute. But with digital goods you can just tell the seller to eat it (digital good, no actual cost loss)

badclient• 13 years ago

I think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.

devx• 13 years ago

Agreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.

sounders2• 13 years ago

As a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).

jrochkind13• 13 years ago

After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward.

That describes so many Google services. Some live on anyway, because for whatever reasons they meet Google's interests to keep running (Google Books). Some don't.

sdfjkl• 13 years ago

Which prompts the question - should you bother signing up for Google Wallet (if applicable, i.e. digital goods only). Since that may just end up suffering the same fate.

msvan• 13 years ago

I think it's safe to say that Google will not be getting out of payments any time soon. Wallet is already tied into the enormous Play Store, so they certainly have a healthy userbase, and seeing as Google primarily is a digital services company it makes more sense for them to not target physical goods.

mh-• 13 years ago

I don't think one should read much into them needing Wallet internally.

Google needing to accept credit card transactions for the Play Store is almost tangential to the service: offering a supported API to 3rd party merchant-users for processing digital goods transactions.

The latter involves risk assessment, underwriting, customer support, maintaining card association/acquirer relationships, so on.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

How inconvenienced will you be if they shut it down? It's not like the entire world will just move to it right away and forget about cash.

jfoster• 13 years ago

Wallet supports month-to-month subscriptions. If Wallet shuts down without those subscribers being migrated to something else, that could be very damaging to a company.

joeblau• 13 years ago

While this seems bad from the title, it's actually pretty good. They are consolidating redundant systems into one system: Google Wallet.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

But Google wallet can't be used if you sell physical things.

hrkristian• 13 years ago

Yet... I'm Norwegian so the Play Store only contains apps, as such I have no idea if ordering Nexus devices means using Google Wallet or something else entirely, what's the deal there?

traviscj• 13 years ago

Make an app for ordering an item, then?

Or go meta: make an app which makes apps for ordering an item.

kyledrake• 13 years ago

If you think Google shuts down APIs this quickly and casually now, wait until after the stock market bubble bursts.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

+1 I agree, and not just concerning Google. That said, Google seems to be aiming at increasing revenue by concentrating on fewer things, but from what I read about Google Ventures, Google car, etc., they still are placing long bets.

I blogged a year ago about 4 or 5 Google canclled services that inconvenienced my customers and/or me.

muzz2• 13 years ago

This is old news from months ago. The Nov 20 date was mentioned back in May:

http://www.slashgear.com/google-checkout-to-be-retired-novem...

jonknee• 13 years ago

This will have no noticeable effect on quarterly results. Same for other notable shutdowns like Google Reader or any of the various APIs shuttered in 2011 (Translate, Finance, Code Search, etc etc).

JohnBooty• 13 years ago

I can't imagine ever building something that relies on a Google service at this point.

There is a lot of collateral damage when they do things like this, damage that hurts them when even when it comes to developers like me who've never written a single line of code that integrates with Google Checkout.

przemelek• 13 years ago

Yeah, but how many business was using Google Checkout as only method of payment? This decision will hurt only those businesses. Rest of businesses using Google Checkout will remove one of payments method. Not a big deal, and we may guess that this method was probably not so popular already.

unreal37• 13 years ago

I had a client that used Google Checkout as the only method of payment. It's not rare. It is a mom & pop (truly) web site selling products online.

spoiledtechie• 13 years ago

My startup for a time being was only using Google Checkout. Here lies the problem. Can't trust Google with building APIs when they reorganize.

This is surprising to me, but I wonder if Google Maps could close down....

kkthnxbye• 13 years ago

I feel the problem lies in the fact that Google shuts down whatever service they deem not "successful". Because of this, I'm starting to weigh my options differently when Google services are in the picture, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

That being said, any other services could be shut down via an aqui-hire, or other reasons. Maybe this is the prevailing problem of small time developers like myself, and there's no other way around it apart from getting your idea bootstrapped with these services, and hopefully by the time any of those services gets shut down (if ever), you'll have a migration / backup plan of some sort.

c4mden• 13 years ago

As someone previously burned by this business model, let me be the first to tell you how right you are. I built a small business around their SOAP search API some seven years ago, and received a commercial license and increased API usage to bring my product to market.

After easily lining up enough customers to exceed my daily limit, I lobbied for higher usage and a method to share the revenue (they had no structure to charge for API calls back then). For years I tried to contact anyone I could within the organization, but there was no response. After an eternity, they simply shut it down with no notice.

You just never know how long they're going to enjoy experimenting with their APIs, and unless you have a backup plan, it's a deal breaker.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I got yelled at for telling people that :-) Or more seriously when I worked at Google a third party came to me excited about a new Google service that I knew was like the half baked 20% project of a new employee and getting little traction. I suggested they hold off on committing until it was more fully baked. Long story short it got back to the guy and I got scolded for 'sabotaging' a project (which vanished without a trace 9 months later when the person moved on to a project that didn't encourage 20% time).

I completely understood the idea of 'trying' something to see if it would work, but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

That said, payments systems at Google have always been really really weird. Weird in the sense that they tend to 'force' a user support infrastructure which has historically been anathema to Google product deployment. People will put up with "Go to this forum and ask your question, maybe another user can help you out." for a lot of things, but when it involves actual money, not so much. Not to mention the rules that come along with handling money. It's really too bad since Google could be a force for great good here, instead PayPal continues to own the space. (I'm rooting for Dwolla and Square though, they are showing great strength here).

DanBC2• 13 years ago

but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

Wasn't that the point of Labs? To allow experimental projects to get used by people outside Google?

ClashTheBunny• 13 years ago

I can't imagine ever building something that relies on a <any company name> service at this point.

Seriously, if you don't build it or own it, you can't rely on it. SaaS is convenient, but it's a flawed business model if you depend on any startup/product lasting forever. If you want to last forever, you have to innovate for yourself or buy the people you will depend on.

nsh1991• 13 years ago

i think square has come up with a very good idea thats going to change the payment systems

1qaz2wsx3edc• 13 years ago

Don't worry, Google will buy them and shut them down too.

hnriot2• 13 years ago

Why would you think that? It's not like Dorsey needs the money, Square are doing genuinely innovative things and I very much doubt they would be interested in selling to BigCorp.

tedks• 13 years ago

Checkout isn't mentioned on Gwern's predictions for google product closure: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns

I hope he updates the page now that we have this additional data point, I'd love to see how his predictions performed.

mortehu2• 13 years ago

That's because his post is newer than the announcement that Checkout would close. It was probably in his "Dead products" list.

gwern3• 13 years ago

It's actually in the followup list. I added it 152 days ago (21 May 2013) when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 hit HN announcing the closure of Checkout in November, but that apparently was after I closed down data collection so I could finalize the analysis. (Wow, did I finish that analysis that long ago?)

From my notes, I'm confused about how to treat it. The discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 among various HNers suggests that it's sorta like Checkout is becoming Google Wallet, but also sorta not, so I'm not sure whether to consider this one of the transition/renamed products or whether Checkout was killed and Wallet happens to have some similar functionality.

anderspetersson• 13 years ago

Google Checkout has been depreciated since May. It's not like this come as a suprise.

jrochkind13• 13 years ago

the word is 'deprecated'.

'depreciated' is a different word.

seldo3• 13 years ago

pawn2• 13 years ago

I'm still annoyed that iGoogle is going away. I've tried some alternatives and still haven't found one I like as well. And now it reminds me every day that its going away. Ugh.

marban2• 13 years ago

Which parts of iGoogle (fragments) did you actually use?

pawn2• 13 years ago

I use it mostly for RSS feeds, which come in a surprising variety of formats that not all of iGoogle's would-be replacers can handle. I also have a weather app, the Gmail app, and I like that I can read at least a portion of some stories directly within it without going to the website.

fotcorn• 13 years ago

I moved to http://www.protopage.com which is very similar to iGoogle.

baldfat• 13 years ago

WOW and it is right in the middle of the Christmas RUSH! Never Depend on Google!

tlogan2• 13 years ago

I know that a significant set of people here are saying that this is "end of Google". Actually, this is "beginning of Google". Google must focus on things they are best at: advertisement.

The problem with their approach of having many half finished products that they were actually helping competition: they were discovering and validating market which is then captured by smaller companies.

And my prediction is that the following Google products will probably die out soon:

* Google App Engine - competition is improving at rapid pace and it is hard to keep up without focus.

* Google Blogger - they will probably just make something similar under Google+

* Google Groups

Probably there is more... but these are the one I see.

marban2• 13 years ago

App Engine — are you serious? New releases every few weeks, quite a few innovations technology-wise and essentially no freeriders. Also, I don't see a lot of competition in terms of equivalent solutions; if at all.

tlogan2• 13 years ago

I can be wrong about App Engine. Here is my reasoning...

I think App Engine does not fit nicely into Google's grand vision: which is mobile, social, and search for advertising purposes. So they need to be become profitable soon or they will be shut down.

However they lack enterprise customers and without enterprise and corporate customers it very hard to make things profitable.

abritishguy• 13 years ago

This isn't "news", I was notified months ago.

skore3• 13 years ago

This actually solves a problem for me. For a long time, "finish Google Checkout recurring billing integration" was on my todo list. Just didn't get to it due to limited time and confusing documentation. Now I can simply close that ticket.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

To be fair, even PayPal screws up recurring billing.

skore3• 13 years ago

After having integrated nearly a hundred payment services: To be fair, recurring billing is hard.

dpatrick86• 13 years ago

Stripe recurring billing is pretty straightforward

seldo3• 13 years ago

We were an early customer and love those guys to bits, but even on Stripe things get complicated when you've been around long enough to have changed your pricing plans a few times and have users who need to migrate from one to the other, etc.. Recurring billing is intrinsically hard.

ck2• 13 years ago

Didn't google give out millions in coupons for using their checkout last holiday season? (maybe it was 2011)

muzz2• 13 years ago

This is nothing new, the Nov 20 date was well-known back in May:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/google-checkout-for-merch...

kunai2• 13 years ago

While Checkout was deprecated for months, this marks the fourth in several huge shutdowns by Google. Reader, iGoogle, AOSP, and now Checkout. Not to mention their 3E mantra with companies like Sparrow and QuickOffice.

Is there any way that Google can even be thought of as not evil anymore?

I'm slowly shifting everything away from Google. I'm using an iPhone 3G as my main smartphone; switched to DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and have switched my email to private hosting for anything confidential and Outlook for public email.

There's really nothing they could do, good or bad, to get me back at this point. They've proven, time and time again, that they don't care about the customer, and frankly, I'm tired of it.

wmf• 13 years ago

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that AOSP was shut down.

kunai2• 13 years ago

Well, without Google's proprietary Play Services, it's practically unusable by itself.

adamb_2• 13 years ago

If this was because checkout was a commercial failure they need to make that public knowledge. Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering. I'm specifically thinking of Google Voice & Keep.

jrochkind13• 13 years ago

How would it help you to know that it was a commercial failure? How would knowing that change your conclusion that you can't rely on Google products?

rsynnott2• 13 years ago

Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering.

Given history, yeah, you don't want to be seriously dependent on anything non-core.

adamb_2• 13 years ago

Personally, I would find it understandable if Google closed checkout because they failed to generate solid profits from it. I saw only after my comment that checkout was deprecated in part because they have another existing product in the same space, Google wallet.

Thiz• 13 years ago

It will be replaced by 'Google Bitcoin'.

coldcode• 13 years ago

The only thing Google will never shut down is ads.

jusben13693• 13 years ago

If you want large companies to innovate (and I do) you can't complain bitterly if they fail and retire a product or service in this way (which as others have noted included a lot of notice) The flip side is big companies won't innovate or release anything new. "No way! Have you seen how people complain if we have to close it down? Not worth taking the chance of all that bitching"

P.S It's kind of funny that one of the alternatives they pushed at the time of the initial announcement was Braintree who then went on to be acquired by PayPal. Shows you how fluid/active this space is.

minikites• 13 years ago

So why not do it faster to avoid people relying on the service for many years? Set a private internal deadline of 6 months or a year, then if it's not as successful as your initial goal, kill it then, not seven years later, after tons of people have come to rely on it.

jusben13693• 13 years ago

Again you're just craving this predictability and risk reduction which is at loggerheads of taking chances and entering new markets.

laaph• 13 years ago

Partly because it is hard to operate in an economy that is far too nimble. One of the reasons that it is hard to sell to a large businesses as a small business is that it is quite likely that you will go out of business - and that will cost them a lot of time and money to reconfigure if that happens.

Most components designed to be included in a larger product for sale will be available from another manufacturer, aka "second source". This is in case the first company goes out of business. Unfortunately, this practice does not seem to have made it to the software world, and so when a company goes out of business, your existing working solution no longer exists, and you will have to scramble to find another one (or go out of business yourself, if you depended on that functionality).

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

Google are generating a lot of uncertainty in their product offerings lately. To innovate you need to know when to call it quits and move onto something else. It's quite clear Google Checkout wasn't the success that Google had hoped it would be and are closing it down to divert resources and cash somewhere else where it might be better utilised. People will complain about this situation, but would you rather Google kept a service running just to appease a few die-hards when it's probably costing them money?

We need stronger and tougher competition in the online payments space. Paypal seriously can't be the only globally working payment and checkout substitute around, maybe Google has a similar service that's stronger and more feature packed up their sleeves? I hope so.

talles• 13 years ago

What is the difference between google wallet and google checkout again?

bcx• 13 years ago

This is insanely bad timing. They should shut it down in January of 2014 after all the E-commerce retailers make all their money.

No one in Ecommerce wants to touch their tech stack during the only quarter that matters to them.

[edit] Apparently the shutdown was announced in May. Regardless, it probably would have been better to shut it down in September, than right before Cyber Monday.

seldo3• 13 years ago

I think the difference between "old Google" and "current Google" is that old Google would have been honest and said "the closest available equivalents are Paypal and Amazon Payments". Instead the migration partnership (presumably with a rev share) is Braintree, which while capable is not really the same sort of product.

It sucks to have to close things down, but sometimes you do, and they gave everybody 6+ months of notice to migrate back in May, but being disingenuous about the best alternative is mealy-mouthed and "un-Googly".

clarky07• 13 years ago

I'm just starting a new SaaS project. Google was immediately checked off as a source of anything for the project as it is too hard to know if the service will exist in a year.

azifali• 13 years ago

Thanks for eating up more than $3000 from my company, Google Checkout.

integricho• 13 years ago

There are many webdev learning books that used Google Checkout and built an app using their service as an example.. It will be fun for people reading the book after a couple of years about a service that doesn't exists anymore, it'll be like reading some sacred scrolls from times forgotten by today's humans..

blinks• 13 years ago

Specifically:

* Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods

* Merchants selling through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) will be unaffected

* Merchants selling physical goods will need to switch to third-party alternatives (see below)

-- https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449

Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th

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