Google Checkout New Fee Structure – The Honeymoon is Over

The cases are unpacked, the tans are fading, the memories of a great honeymoon are still fresh in the mind, then BOOM!!! The bomb drops as the credit card bill arrives, and you realize you now have to get back to reality and start paying for everything.

YES. The Honeymoon is over!

The same is now true for all those people who married Google’s payment system (Google Checkout) to their shopping cart checkout systems. Lured by the HUGE carrot of 10 times their ad spend as free processing, they switched. Well now that honeymoon will be over from may 2009, and the loving willing bed-mate you had for that brief period, has turned into a distant, selfish money grabber, same as all the others…

Google Checkout was the darling of Ecommerce stores, it allowed people to save a LOT of money on processing fees, but as their recent announcement states , all this is coming to an end. So what does this mean to a business?

I have a client, they ship 500 orders a month, average order of £40 making sales at £20k.
They spend around £500 a week, over £2k per month, so they pay no fees to Google Checkout, nor will they until end of April 2009. THEN WHAT?

well 500 items @ £0.20 = £100 (OUCH)

£20,000 value @ 1.9% = £380 (DOUBLE OUCH)

So the carrot gone, the previously willing loving bed-mate suddenly wearing neck to toe flannel nightgowns and bed-socks, what do you do?

 

It is off to findanewpartner.com for many, my client for example is switching back to tried and trusted old faithfuls. They might not be pretty, might not be willing, might not be loving, but they ARE consistent!

I wonder how many others will follow this route?

One Response to “Google Checkout New Fee Structure – The Honeymoon is Over”

  1. At some point people will begin to realise that Google can’t keep offering all their services for free simply off the back of their profit from Adwords.

    Google Voice is coming soon – will this be another case of “free for a while” marketing?