Send money with Gmail
google.com
google.com
Pay-by-Gmail, which is what we launched today, is actually used through Gmail on your desktop.
/obligatory
If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?
For details about what we can and can't help with, take a look at this article:
But Google will not issue chargebacks for payments made via "send money with GMail".
>This feature will be rolling out to Gmail users ages 18+ in the U.S. over the next few months
One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.
I've had nothing but excellent (less then 6 hour) response times from Stripe.
Got a 500 error back from their API once and had an email from one of their engineers in my inbox almost immediately after to find out what happened and resolve it (my http lib was using stale DNS).
If Google provides meaningful support for Wallet going forward, I hope they consider extending it to Apps - it's desperately needed.
that is not the general consensus of google apps customers, so i am curious what experiences have caused you to have this opinion.
thanks!
This is so late to the market as to be irrelevant.
Credit-card based solutions have monumentally failed to gain traction vs interac for ages.
When will we be able to store Bitcoin in Google Wallet?
Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, transactions delayed, etc. when money is involved. Google historically doesn't have a good track record for "hand holding customer service".
*I have no idea, I'm just guessing.
Just like how gas stations make more money from a cup of coffee than 10 gallons of unleaded.
If you allow any email, then what about man-in-middle attack as the email might go over SMTP/plain text?
Actually.... bitcoin.
We're sending money to the I/O attendees first, and then they'll be able to send money to their friends, and so on.
Wow, that's an amazing way to track social connections among developers. I bet it's really exciting to watch the network spread.
I'm a software engineer at Google and I just wanted to let you know how to get your money back!
I'm sorry if we weren't properly indexed when the card was retired, but as of now searching for 'google wallet prepaid refund' returns the correct link at the top. (With the phone support number on the 'Contact Us' sub-page listed there[1].)
Since we had special support staff for this refund (and Wallet in general), I suspect that the number you found was not the correct one, which would explain the confusion. I've used the Wallet customer support, and have always been impressed, so I'm hoping that really is what happened.
I can't tell you why you haven't received your funds, but the customer support reps at that number are authorized (with your consent) to look up that information and help you out.
Cheers! Doug
[1] http://www.google.com/wallet/prepaid-refund/contact.html
Clicking 'Learn more' on this page https://wallet.google.com/enroll/ basically opens the same page again, for me.
Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.
Google has strict rules, and sometimes makes mistakes, and doesn't have any way to sort out those mistakes. It sucks for those people. And since those people are (by definition) the kind of people with websites you do hear about it quite often.
Having said that, you do sometimes hear about people with large numbers of adsense viewers being called (real telephone call!) by Googlers offering advice about better results.
And you hear from people with adword accounts that they get to speak to real people.
I don't know any numbers, but I bet Google has a lot of people wanting to contact them.
I'm saying that the poor service offered Adsense partners isn't excused because they're not customers. If anything, it indicates that customer service will be worse based on this totally made up hierarchy that I've just made up (partners more important than customers, should have higher priority service).
When you're a small business and Google bans you for some unknown reason and seizes your money - here is what will happen.
* You might receive some type of form letter in response, but you will not be able to get an intelligent reply from a trained customer service agent. * You will not be able to reach anybody on the phone for any price that will help you out. * You will not find out what the issue was that caused a ban. * Your small business will die a slow death. * Depending on the amount of money the owners have (most small businesses don't have a lot) they will struggle to even pay their employees their final checks with this cash seized. * You are forever banned from using AdSense again, so forget starting up another online business ever again.
Google is an amazing company that has some frankly despicable business practices that more people need to pay attention to and call them out for.
People are in denial but some truth is coming out little by little.
But since I'm completely ignorant of your case, I'm gonna shoot my mouth off a bit, and hope I don't get in trouble for it.
Google spends insane amounts of effort tracking these cases. I've met lots of six-figure-salary folks who hours or days of every week looking into corner cases. And they're just the tip of the iceberg. Again, I'm not speaking to your particular case, but the thing we learn is that out of every hundred people who say what you're saying, at least 99 of them have repeatedly violated the rules, and more than 50 of them got multiple warnings.
And it's not like Google is keeping the money. Google's fraud-fighting effort is not a profit centre, by any stretch.
I'm not saying that Customer Service is Google's forte, but the internet is full of a lot of lies, and lots of them are told by people who tried to scam us, or scam our customers, and are hilariously outraged that we caught them.
We have documented everything and we are now in a much stronger position, thanks to our users. We have access to Techcrunch/Techdirt, and we have considered publishing a comprehensive documented story of our experience with AdSense, but decided to put it on hold, since we do not want to associate our name with any controversy. When our start-up successfully exits or if it fails, the situation may change.
I just want to add a couple of things to jholman:
You start from the presumption of guilt. An old adage is that your customer is always right, but your starting point is the opposite. This is probably driven by hubris, that's embedded in Google's DNA: you KNOW BEFORE your customer that your customer wants to commit fraud, BEFORE they have actually committed it.
My point is simple: when you threaten to turn off a $5,000+/mo client, provide knowledgeable PHONE SUPPORT. Have your specialist CALL the victim business. These amounts are not a small change to many people, they will lead to bad PR, like was linked in this thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568.
And do not worry, you will not get fired for defending Google!
But customers don't have to buy from you, and they don't have to give you a reason when they stop buying from you.
I had a fun experience with that call a few years back, when Twiddla was in the spotlight and everybody was calling trying to give us money and free stuff now that we'd proved we didn't need it anymore. I got to explain to the cheerful AdSense Optimization Team guy how I couldn't use his help because we'd had our AdSense account permanently clobbered on a whim a year or so previous and hadn't ever been able to get it reinstated.
As you can imagine, our AdSense account was back up and in good standing the next day. We've never used it since. Fool me once, and all that.
However, I would say that this thread is one of the first places EVER that I have seen someone say google support is good or sufficient or not terrible even. I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has.
I must acknowledge have not used the google support for fiber (I dont have it) and that might indeed be great, as a man who does customer service stuff plenty of times, I know that there is a simple siloing process going on with their support departments.
Nonetheless google has a loooooong way to go to change the "anecdotal" consensus of the internet when it comes to their support, their comments about not doing things that dont scale entirely aside.
In other cases (if I'm the product) nonexistent.
Recently, I had trouble with gmail on my iPhone (due to the whole EAS shutdown) and was looking for help or info on account upgrades. Only userland help forums for me.
I would say: Google's tech support is terrific until you actually have a problem and need to talk to someone.
(To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)
Competition from upstarts like Stripe has pushed them to take customer service seriously.
On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet.
New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).
"... our customer service team will help resolve any questions you might have."
I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.
However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :)
The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!
If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale:
- The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps.
- Manual spam detection in search results
- Customer Support for most adwords accounts
- Customer Support for Nexus devices
I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win.
I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.
http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...
There's real value in recognizing what computers can't do and investing into doing it anyway and it can make your app irreplaceable.
It seems presented as the former:
> you can securely send money to friends and family in the U.S. - without leaving your Gmail inbox
but people will assuredly try to use it as the latter. When that happens, how will Google address fraud claims?
Edit: Specifically, I mean, how will they investigate fraud claims? Will all transactions be final (easiest), or will they try to refund people who make mistakes (harder)? And what happens when a GMail account gets hacked?
Presumably the same way PayPal handles "personal" funds transfers - they don't.
They've specifically flagged this as between friends and family only, which is to say it comes with no warranties. PayPal also has a lower-fee version of their service for the same use case - you get the lower rate in exchange for giving up purchase protection.
This is also why when buying things online anyone who asks you to mark the payment as "PayPal gift" should be given a very stern sober second look.
My chat client, IMAP client etc all save the password. Guessing the password is the least likely avenue of attack.
Google's app specific passwords are revokable which is the important part. They also can't access sensitive account operations which means you can't reset the master password if you just have an ASP.
If you lose control of your email password you can revoke it and generate a new one. The passwords are long and secure,
App-specific passwords are one-factor in any case (they are "something you know" just like any other password), and are an alternative to two-factor auth for certain places where Google's two-factor auth isn't supported for one reason or another. Google's 2-factor auth requires a device (usually, smartphone app) generated code alongside your regular Google password.
Obviously there's nothing Google can do about the fact that people want to access their email over things like imap that aren't built with Google 2-factor in mind.
> securely send money to friends and family _in the U.S._
Google Voice it's the same problem - most of the world can't use it. Instead of 80/20 this is 20/80
Telecommunication services is also a legal and regulatory minefield - one that requires less capital up-front, but just as much (if not more) bureaucratic headaches.
I'm sure they're working on it, and it's either in-progress or not worth it.
(e.g.: in the US, if you are a phone line provider, you get money for incoming calls from other providers when they call you - to the point that something like GoogleVoice could turn a profit just from those fees (unlikely, but possible - many conference call services were run like that).
In most of the world, these termination fees are not enough to provide meaningful income that makes a GoogleVoice profitable (or at the very least, not very expensive) to run.
Anyways, a while ago I heard a rumor that they had a team working on adding some, um... alternative, payment methods. Does anyone know where Google Wallet is headed with this?
Edit And here's some clues from the ToS[1]:
> 6. Google Wallet Balance & Peer to Peer Payments
> 6.1 The P2P Service is currently available only to Senders and Recipients who are U.S. residents and who otherwise meet the requirements of these Terms of Service. The P2P Service may not be used for business, commercial or charitable transactions.
> 6.2.a.iii For a Funding Account that is an ACH-enabled checking or savings account, initiate a debit through the ACH Network in the P2P Payment amount.
> 6.6 GPC may charge fees in accordance with the then-current fee schedule, as stated herein. Google Wallet may assess a fee of 2.9%, with a minimum fee of $0.30, per P2P Payment charged to the Sender for P2P Payments processed through the Service. Such fee shall be waived where your Google Wallet Balance is used for the P2P Payment, or an ACH-enabled checking or savings account is the Funding Account for the P2P Payment.
Looks like they've beat out Dwolla here. Ouch.
I'm also really interested in what forbidding "charitable transactions" actually entails. Is it just donations to 501(c)(3)s or is it gifts of other types? How about political donations? And what's its primary purpose? My first thought was that it must be for tax reasons, but then I remembered that people who want to prevent PayPal charge backs often request that payments be marked as "gifts", so it can't be disputed.
[1] https://wallet.google.com/legaldocument?family=0.buyertos...
I think its either liability reasons or just market segmentation (so that receivers of the transactions need a merchant account of some kind); note that they don't ever single out "charitable transactions" alone, its always an exclusion of "business, commercial, or charitable transactions" (in several different places in the agreement), so I would assume that the reason for "charitable transactions" is linked to the reason for business and commercial transactions.
2.4 Relation to your Google Account
In order to use Google Wallet Services, you must have a Google Account which is in good standing with Google, in accordance with the Google Terms of Service. If you or Google closes your Google Account for any reason, your Google Wallet Account will also be closed and you will no longer be able to access the Google Wallet Services.
Not all of the worlds 7 billion people live in the united states you know ...
AFAIK, IANAL, IIRC, etc etc etc etc
Is it possible to hold an account without any sort of tax ID number (ITIN or SSN) Surely one of them is required?
However, over the years it's been a massive PITA to maintain since I'm not a resident, and it's getting progressively more difficult - in fact I just moved all my money out of the US to a USD account in a more friendly jurisdiction (New Zealand, where I currently live) because it was getting to the stage where I could see them possibly freezing my account and it being a pain to sort out. I suspect I wouldn't be able to open the account under the same circumstances now.
They set up a Google Wallet. See Sec. 6.3(f) of the ToS [1].
[1] https://wallet.google.com/legaldocument?family=0.buyertos...
edit: Found it - GP may be referring to this - I have not yet looked at Google's new offering enough to see if this is truly comparable for personal payments, however:
Is there a fee for using Amazon WebPay?
No, there is no charge to send money using Amazon WebPay.
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/personal/webpay/faq#wp...
"Note: You cannot add funds to your Amazon Payments account by using a credit card."
And I know because I use it every month to pay rent with my credit card. For FREE!
I'm probably off on the whole thing here, because the examples in the vid show it as sort of a way to make good with your pals and not so much for ecommerce, but being an old timer, I sort of like to leave my money transfers to people that specialize in it and not as an add-on to my email client.
It is also the first time that it felt like Google was stepping where it might not belong. And its a weird thing since I believe anyone should be able to do anything and let the market decide. For some reason this gave me the same vibe I used to get when a Microsoft would announce they were going to enter some hot new market in order to chill any investment/work in that market. I don't think that is their plan, but perhaps its a happy side effect they get?
I'd much rather see Google create an actual bank and then integrate with that banks services than do it this way.
You said to ask you any questions, so far you only answered one single question for the last hour. Why would you say ask me anything and don't respond to the questions?
This would definitely make classic social-engineering tricks like Nigerian scams easier to pull off.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/latest-facebook-scam-phishe...
People will just through hoops to receive money.
In a way I think we're seeing Google striking against Facebook in what I call the "identity wars" where each service is struggling to be an identity and information service about people.
In what way does this announcement make this more or less evident?
How? I mean, obviously, if you use this service (either as a sender or receiver) Google will know more about your real identity as part of conducting the transaction, but how does this say anything about what Google knows "from their logging of IPs and search terms"?
On the phone, I'm told roughly: "I'm going to ask you four questions to verify your identity. The questions are based on publicly available data." [hold]
(He just asked me the last four of my social and the year of my birth. And my address. And is now preparing four questions. - Where was my SSN issued? Multiple choice. - Which month was I born? Multiple choice. - Which name are you associated with (weird list of names? None of the Above.) - Which county have you lived in? Multiple choice.
I answered them correctly, obviously. Now being redirected to a survey.
I am fairly certain both of those can be determined with reasonable accuracy from your SSN itself. (the middle two digits of your SSN should roughly correspond with the month of issue (likely the month of birth), and the first three digits should give you the area).
Edit: Nevermind, it only asked for the last four of your SSN I guess.
It's a massive market. Google has hit a jackpot there. I salute then.
Paypal's era is coming to an end, it was just a matter of time who would have claimed it. Luckily, it was Google rather than Facebook.
Also note you need to verify your identity before you hook up your bank acct.
> Google properties such as Google Play, Google Drive, YouTube etc. are not covered under the Google Wallet Purchase Protection. Please reach out to those products directly through their help centers.
Is gmail lumped under the "etc." above?
Yeah. Right.
I work at a large place, about 100k people, and we have at least 10 compromised accounts a week.
It won't be long before I just proxy all of my traffic through Amazon s3 or something.
(I'm in the same little boat outside of the US territorial waters btw)
If they continue innovating in the payment space at this rate, they will maybe have a solution people here can actually use in 2020.
At my bank you can get a credit card at an added cost, but it's not needed for anything in the Netherlands so I never looked into it.
To the consumer they appear basically the same (“they both have the VISA logo right?”), but in understanding the mechanics of what is happening, they could not be more different.
However, I doubt this will have an instant effect. I'm not sure about the current status, but at some point sellers I contacted couldn't add Google Checkout as payment option as it was US exclusive.
The biggest problem with Venmo was users. Only my close group of friends has Venmo but with co-workers or strangers we have to resort to cash and bill splits.
Pretty much everyone I know has Gmail. Google just made Venmo obsolete.
It's pretty amazing that it's possible now and so easy.
(edit: The FAQ page just says it's free, but doesn't isn't clear about limits)
If it only takes a few clicks to 'reply with money', and if the scammer only asks for a small amount, this method seems to have a much lower 'barrier' than wire transfers.
/s
Where does the "not evil" part come in? It doesn't.
I'm not sure how the market will react to that but it's clearly deliberate and could turn into a great way to drive adoption, as merchants will clearly prefer to use G Wallet with no fees and will push their users toward that whenever possible.
(I realize this is being marketed as P2P but if they intend to take down PayPal et al, it will surely evolve into a way to pay merchants for things).
And if they charged you anything less than 1% for CC transactions, even if it cost them less than that, they'd have people gaming it for the purpose of accumulating CC rewards like cashback and airline miles.