Google Admits Defeat

Google Admits Defeat In Its 7-Year Battle With Amazon And PayPal 

Google

Google just announced that is it is shutting down Google Checkout, a Web-based payments system it launched to great expectations seven years ago. It will continue to offer Google Wallet and handle transactions for apps, games, music, and movies on the Google Play store. But Google is largely getting out of the business of processing payments for physical goods and services. Google Checkout may have had great expectations, but it delivered little in the way of results. Amazon and eBay's PayPal continue to dominate e-commerce, with a host of lesser-known players also doing the digital scutwork of processing credit-card transactions online. (Two of those, Braintree and Shopify, are offering discounts to former Google Checkout customers.) Google does billions of dollars a year in credit-card transactions. But most of that is for a purely digital product: online ads purchased by small businesses.