Why we Disabled Google Checkout / Google Wallet on our Site

This is why LWN has never jumped into Google Checkout. Google is a great company in a lot of ways, but they just don't do customer service. When it comes to your revenue stream, it's really important to have somebody you can actually talk to.

Note that bit about Paypal phone support being responsive and helpful: true to my experience.

Google isn't a payment company and because of this, they don't know how to run Google checkout properly.

Both Amazon and Google automate their customer service for anyone using their checkout services.

This is unacceptable to me as a business owner. Paypal isn't perfect, but at least they're in the business of payments. It's not a side business.

The payment processing fee structure almost incentivizes these customer support nonresponses. If I'm a small company experiencing technical problems with payments, I'm losing ~95% on each error while the payment processor is losing the remaining sliver. For a startup, these sales are critical, but for the payment processor, the fees on these low volume transactions are chump change. I can only hope a bigger customer is experiencing similar issues so the bug fix can be expedited. My only recourses are switching payment processors and generating some bad publicity through a blog post.

The only real issue with Paypal is unfortunately a huge one if you're unlucky enough to get caught up in it - their overly-aggressive "holds" on funds in accounts. Other than that their customer service is better, their site easier to use, and they have the benefit of a huge network effect already in place. Paypal even called me a couple of days ago to verify that a transaction (I was the buyer) was legitimate. In the past they would have just rejected it and left it up to me to contact them to convince them otherwise.

Working Google Cache URL: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

I would not be surprised if this "issue" gets resolved within a few weeks or so. I had problems with getting my own wallet to work on a Google apps domain account and that is how long it took them to get it working (yes, I know weakness.com is a commercial account, but google doesn't appear to be prioritizing it).

I wonder if weakness.com would reinstate the payment method at that time.

Because Database Error? I guess that's a good enough reason.