Google Checkout

» see checkout.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Google Checkout never reached Turkey at any real scale. It launched in the United States, then the United Kingdom, and for most of the world it stayed a thing you read about rather than a button you clicked. Paying online here in the mid-2000s meant a local bank card and whatever your bank's own gateway looked like. The American fight over who would sit between you and your money was a fight happening somewhere else, and I watched it as an engineer reads industry news, from a distance.

It went live on 28 June 2006 as Google's shot at PayPal. The pitch was simple: one login, one stored card, a faster checkout on any store that added the button, and processing fees that Google was willing to eat because it made money elsewhere. For a company that already knew who everyone was through search and Gmail, owning the last step of a purchase looked like an obvious next move.

eBay disagreed loudly. It banned Google Checkout from its marketplace, pulled its own AdWords spending in protest, and did what it could to keep its PayPal subsidiary unthreatened. The two companies spent years circling each other, and the ordinary shopper mostly never noticed there had been a war.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The trouble was that PayPal had already won the habit. People had accounts, sellers had integrations, and trust in a payment method is the slowest thing on the internet to move. Google Checkout was cheaper and technically fine, and none of that was enough. Being second at money is much worse than being second at search.

~ what really happened ~

By the early 2010s Google's attention had moved to phones and to tap-to-pay, and it wanted one payments brand instead of two. Checkout got absorbed into Google Wallet, and on 20 November 2013 the standalone service was switched off. The idea did not die so much as get renamed and then renamed again, through Wallet and Pay and whatever comes after, none of which ever became the thing that finally beat PayPal at its own game.

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