Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th | Hacker News Reader

Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th

support.google.com

233 pointstephra137 comments

I can't imagine ever building something that relies on a Google service at this point.

There is a lot of collateral damage when they do things like this, damage that hurts them when even when it comes to developers like me who've never written a single line of code that integrates with Google Checkout.

Yeah, but how many business was using Google Checkout as only method of payment? This decision will hurt only those businesses. Rest of businesses using Google Checkout will remove one of payments method. Not a big deal, and we may guess that this method was probably not so popular already.

I had a client that used Google Checkout as the only method of payment. It's not rare. It is a mom & pop (truly) web site selling products online.

Indeed. I did a similar setup years and years ago for a mom and pop shop (well before Braintree and Stripe) and I had to choose between Paypal and Google Checkout. Glad I set them up with Paypal.

My startup for a time being was only using Google Checkout. Here lies the problem. Can't trust Google with building APIs when they reorganize.

This is surprising to me, but I wonder if Google Maps could close down....

> I wonder if Google Maps could close down....

No. Google has bought what must be dozens of companies at this point just to support and improve Maps (Waze being the latest), it's reportedly profitable & popular, with the continued rise of mobile I'd expect it to become more important, and my little survival analysis (http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns) gives it 87% odds of surviving to May 2018 (which IMO is too low).

That page is always really interesting when it comes up, but have you considered adding data for existing product improvements by acquisition? You include a variable for whether it was initially acquired or not, but perhaps big acquisitions clearly for the purpose of improving a product are a strong signal of longevity?

That's not a bad idea, but at this point it would be hard to go back and be able to classify each product by how many other products were merged into it. That information is not always clearly laid out publicly (to say the least).

Also there are a bunch of government people who work on it I think.

I saw a bunch of public linkedIn profiles with NSA analysts and people in the private sector with google maps listed as experience for whatever reason

Google maps and Google earth are used extensively for imagery analysis and intelligence work. They aren't working with the maps team so much as using it as a tool.

That's insane, maps collects huge amounts of data, google's raw material.

But you'd have to assume that Checkout also collected lots of raw data about people and their purchasing habits. It wasn't as if nobody used the service, it just wasn't the most popular.

Not enough data to be useful though. If they can't make behavioural predictive models of you to make ads & sell to the NSA it's not useful

Mapping is such a core part of the mobile OS experience I can't see them shuttering it. Separate from that, they use it to show ads and promote their other services (like Google Plus).

I doubt they'll kill it, but would you be confident the APIs will be there in a few years? Between Apple and the mass defections to OpenStreetMap et al when they raised pricing, their third-party use is not what it was.

The more relevant question is not whether Google Maps could close down but whether it will change in a manner that adversely affects you. For example, with their new vector-based system, will Google phase out tiles at some point? There are some apps that might be incompatible with vector-based data, so this could matter. Or more relevantly, will Google restrict API access? Think of Twitter -- it's never closed its Tweet stream, but it has changed the rules for API usage, to the detriment of certain Twitter clients.

As a (for context, Android) user, changes to Google Maps have already adversely affected me. I (until very recently) lived in NYC.

The best way to tell what direction you were facing when you came above ground from being on the subway was to look at the direction of traffic aligning with the arrows on Google Maps... but they decided that was no longer an important map feature and got rid of it.

I would frequently be zoomed into a specific location, and relatively soon after need to switch contexts on the OS (to check an email, answer a text message, etc.). When I returned to the app it used to be that it would retain the zoom level, but after updates it seems that Google thinks it's useful/funny/cute to zoom back out to the full zoom of the overall trip. For the life of me, I can't imagine a context in which this is useful.

They've got a monopoly on mapping data, and insist on taking a great app and making it worse. I can't understand why.

Umm... Google maps has a compass... which rotates with you as you turn. Just look at your icon on the map, at has an arrow facing the direction you are.

To be fair, that does require your device has a compass-sensor.

Well, no. Some devices have a compass in them, and Google Maps uses it if possible.

If your device has no inbuilt compass (think iPhone 3G, from memory), there's nothing Google Maps can do about it.

Oh, my bad. I actually thought it was a feature of the GPS, not a separate sensor.

They recently got rid of topographic data for the mobile Maps application. For serious stuff, relying on your phone is a bad idea - you need a real map - but for casual walks, having some idea of elevations was really handy, and now it's gone.

I feel the problem lies in the fact that Google shuts down whatever service they deem not "successful". Because of this, I'm starting to weigh my options differently when Google services are in the picture, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

That being said, any other services could be shut down via an aqui-hire, or other reasons. Maybe this is the prevailing problem of small time developers like myself, and there's no other way around it apart from getting your idea bootstrapped with these services, and hopefully by the time any of those services gets shut down (if ever), you'll have a migration / backup plan of some sort.

As someone previously burned by this business model, let me be the first to tell you how right you are. I built a small business around their SOAP search API some seven years ago, and received a commercial license and increased API usage to bring my product to market.

After easily lining up enough customers to exceed my daily limit, I lobbied for higher usage and a method to share the revenue (they had no structure to charge for API calls back then). For years I tried to contact anyone I could within the organization, but there was no response. After an eternity, they simply shut it down with no notice.

You just never know how long they're going to enjoy experimenting with their APIs, and unless you have a backup plan, it's a deal breaker.

I got yelled at for telling people that :-) Or more seriously when I worked at Google a third party came to me excited about a new Google service that I knew was like the half baked 20% project of a new employee and getting little traction. I suggested they hold off on committing until it was more fully baked. Long story short it got back to the guy and I got scolded for 'sabotaging' a project (which vanished without a trace 9 months later when the person moved on to a project that didn't encourage 20% time).

I completely understood the idea of 'trying' something to see if it would work, but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

That said, payments systems at Google have always been really really weird. Weird in the sense that they tend to 'force' a user support infrastructure which has historically been anathema to Google product deployment. People will put up with "Go to this forum and ask your question, maybe another user can help you out." for a lot of things, but when it involves actual money, not so much. Not to mention the rules that come along with handling money. It's really too bad since Google could be a force for great good here, instead PayPal continues to own the space. (I'm rooting for Dwolla and Square though, they are showing great strength here).

> but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

Wasn't that the point of Labs? To allow experimental projects to get used by people outside Google?

Yes, as far as I could tell that was part of the Labs mission (this was between 2006 and 2010). The confounding factor at the time was that "labs" was one of about four different ways something went from idea into "production" (aka visible outside Google), a tremendous amount depended on the project manager you worked with. There were people who had been at Google long enough that they could get an idea from first successful build to production in a month, knocking down all the various stubs of process that were in the way (like Marissa's UI review). These folks were well regarded by the fact that they got a lot of stuff done. Pretty much anyone, with the right set of people, could ship nearly anything. The downside was that sometimes things that came out were not as baked as they might appear to someone on the outside.

> I can't imagine ever building something that relies on a <any company name> service at this point.

Seriously, if you don't build it or own it, you can't rely on it. SaaS is convenient, but it's a flawed business model if you depend on any startup/product lasting forever. If you want to last forever, you have to innovate for yourself or buy the people you will depend on.

I think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.

Agreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.

As a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).

> After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward.

That describes so many Google services. Some live on anyway, because for whatever reasons they meet Google's interests to keep running (Google Books). Some don't.

If you want large companies to innovate (and I do) you can't complain bitterly if they fail and retire a product or service in this way (which as others have noted included a lot of notice) The flip side is big companies won't innovate or release anything new. "No way! Have you seen how people complain if we have to close it down? Not worth taking the chance of all that bitching"

P.S It's kind of funny that one of the alternatives they pushed at the time of the initial announcement was Braintree who then went on to be acquired by PayPal. Shows you how fluid/active this space is.

So why not do it faster to avoid people relying on the service for many years? Set a private internal deadline of 6 months or a year, then if it's not as successful as your initial goal, kill it then, not seven years later, after tons of people have come to rely on it.

Again you're just craving this predictability and risk reduction which is at loggerheads of taking chances and entering new markets.

Partly because it is hard to operate in an economy that is far too nimble. One of the reasons that it is hard to sell to a large businesses as a small business is that it is quite likely that you will go out of business - and that will cost them a lot of time and money to reconfigure if that happens.

Most components designed to be included in a larger product for sale will be available from another manufacturer, aka "second source". This is in case the first company goes out of business. Unfortunately, this practice does not seem to have made it to the software world, and so when a company goes out of business, your existing working solution no longer exists, and you will have to scramble to find another one (or go out of business yourself, if you depended on that functionality).

This actually solves a problem for me. For a long time, "finish Google Checkout recurring billing integration" was on my todo list. Just didn't get to it due to limited time and confusing documentation. Now I can simply close that ticket.

To be fair, even PayPal screws up recurring billing.

After having integrated nearly a hundred payment services: To be fair, recurring billing is hard.

Care to share an opinion on who does it best? Or least worst?

Can't really pick a best. The reason why I write that recurring billing is hard is because the business cases vary so widely, so the answer is usually: It depends (on your location, userbase, what you're selling...). I started out writing a couple of integrations and you think "hey, why are there so many processors, that's unnecessary!". And then you do a couple dozen and you start to see the picture.

I CAN definitely tell you how to spot the worst, though. In general, when you read the documentation and get the creeping feeling like the API was written for one big client (and their weird business logic) and then they just packaged it up and resold it, badly.

Funnily enough, Google Checkout seemed to be like that to me - for instance, usually you have two things to specify: Time unit and amount of your billing cycle, like "recur every 4 days". Google Checkout didn't do that, no no, much too simple. They only had a time unit - one of: daily, weekly, semi_monthly, monthly, every_two_months, quarterly, yearly.

And that's not the most complex "let us structure time awkwardly" example I have seen over the years. Other services only allow for "days" as time unit and you have to figure out a way to do monthly billing that doesn't just keep running away. My favorite so far was the one where it's basically "day, week, month, quarter, half-year and year". The values for that? D, W, M, Q, 6, Y. Can't make this stuff up.

Other red flags: No English documentation, no public documentation, documentation that specifies variables without data types, unsafe notification functions (not even a shared secret) or downright exotic "security" (I have seen black-box .dll files distributed as security callbacks... oh the horror)... I could go on.

Thanks for the insight.

If it's any consolation my bank pays off my credit card every 30 days. When I signed up the credit card would get payed on the 1st of the month. Over the years that date has drifted to now be the 20th. So even the big players haven't solved this recurring payment problem.

I still think that offering "every N days" and "Nth day of the month" would cover 99% of use-cases. The big problem I ran into was when my credit-card expired, PayPal paid a recurring bill late as it had to do an "e-cheque" that had a long delay on it. So the payment happened late.

The WTF happened the next month, after I fixed the credit card issue - every future bill had the same long delay on it. Somehow their "Pxtl pays on X day of the month" had gotten shifted. So I was getting late notifications every month.

Stripe recurring billing is pretty straightforward

We were an early customer and love those guys to bits, but even on Stripe things get complicated when you've been around long enough to have changed your pricing plans a few times and have users who need to migrate from one to the other, etc.. Recurring billing is intrinsically hard.

This is nothing new, the Nov 20 date was well-known back in May:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/google-checkout-for-merch...

Which prompts the question - should you bother signing up for Google Wallet (if applicable, i.e. digital goods only). Since that may just end up suffering the same fate.

I think it's safe to say that Google will not be getting out of payments any time soon. Wallet is already tied into the enormous Play Store, so they certainly have a healthy userbase, and seeing as Google primarily is a digital services company it makes more sense for them to not target physical goods.

I don't think one should read much into them needing Wallet internally.

Google needing to accept credit card transactions for the Play Store is almost tangential to the service: offering a supported API to 3rd party merchant-users for processing digital goods transactions.

The latter involves risk assessment, underwriting, customer support, maintaining card association/acquirer relationships, so on.

How inconvenienced will you be if they shut it down? It's not like the entire world will just move to it right away and forget about cash.

Wallet supports month-to-month subscriptions. If Wallet shuts down without those subscribers being migrated to something else, that could be very damaging to a company.

This is insanely bad timing. They should shut it down in January of 2014 after all the E-commerce retailers make all their money.

No one in Ecommerce wants to touch their tech stack during the only quarter that matters to them.

[edit] Apparently the shutdown was announced in May. Regardless, it probably would have been better to shut it down in September, than right before Cyber Monday.

Google Checkout has been depreciated since May. It's not like this come as a suprise.

the word is 'deprecated'.

'depreciated' is a different word.

If you think Google shuts down APIs this quickly and casually now, wait until after the stock market bubble bursts.

+1 I agree, and not just concerning Google. That said, Google seems to be aiming at increasing revenue by concentrating on fewer things, but from what I read about Google Ventures, Google car, etc., they still are placing long bets.

I blogged a year ago about 4 or 5 Google canclled services that inconvenienced my customers and/or me.

This is old news from months ago. The Nov 20 date was mentioned back in May:

http://www.slashgear.com/google-checkout-to-be-retired-novem...

This will have no noticeable effect on quarterly results. Same for other notable shutdowns like Google Reader or any of the various APIs shuttered in 2011 (Translate, Finance, Code Search, etc etc).

Title switching to slightly less informative "Retiring Google Checkout Announcement" in 3, 2, 1...

I'm still annoyed that iGoogle is going away. I've tried some alternatives and still haven't found one I like as well. And now it reminds me every day that its going away. Ugh.

Which parts of iGoogle (fragments) did you actually use?

I use it mostly for RSS feeds, which come in a surprising variety of formats that not all of iGoogle's would-be replacers can handle. I also have a weather app, the Gmail app, and I like that I can read at least a portion of some stories directly within it without going to the website.

I moved to http://www.protopage.com which is very similar to iGoogle.

This is probably because requestAutocomplete has been moved into Chrome Beta, and will probably feature tight Wallet integration.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/using-requestautocomplete

More likely was Checkout With Amazon.

I don't think Checkout with Amazon has affected them at all. Checkout was closed to new signups since May 20th (from the article), and Wallet has been the digital-goods alternative for longer than that.

My guess would be that operating a physical goods processing company is a huge drain on the resource Google hates providing most: customer service.

Payment disputes are a pain, especially for physical goods. Some level of mediation is required when someone has purchased a physical good but has a dispute. But with digital goods you can just tell the seller to eat it (digital good, no actual cost loss)

Google never had great customer service for this product. There were less than five people (customers often called this out since they would submit multiple help tickets and the same people would respond) and they never wanted to devote money to better customer service since the product wasn't maintained. Thus companies didn't want to adopt a below par product with bad customer service compounding the problem.

While Checkout was deprecated for months, this marks the fourth in several huge shutdowns by Google. Reader, iGoogle, AOSP, and now Checkout. Not to mention their 3E mantra with companies like Sparrow and QuickOffice.

Is there any way that Google can even be thought of as not evil anymore?

I'm slowly shifting everything away from Google. I'm using an iPhone 3G as my main smartphone; switched to DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and have switched my email to private hosting for anything confidential and Outlook for public email.

There's really nothing they could do, good or bad, to get me back at this point. They've proven, time and time again, that they don't care about the customer, and frankly, I'm tired of it.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that AOSP was shut down.

Well, without Google's proprietary Play Services, it's practically unusable by itself.

Checkout isn't mentioned on Gwern's predictions for google product closure: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns

I hope he updates the page now that we have this additional data point, I'd love to see how his predictions performed.

That's because his post is newer than the announcement that Checkout would close. It was probably in his "Dead products" list.

It's actually in the followup list. I added it 152 days ago (21 May 2013) when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 hit HN announcing the closure of Checkout in November, but that apparently was after I closed down data collection so I could finalize the analysis. (Wow, did I finish that analysis that long ago?)

From my notes, I'm confused about how to treat it. The discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740447 among various HNers suggests that it's sorta like Checkout is becoming Google Wallet, but also sorta not, so I'm not sure whether to consider this one of the transition/renamed products or whether Checkout was killed and Wallet happens to have some similar functionality.

This isn't "news", I was notified months ago.

Scared, shocked and confused for a moment while I thought Google was shutting down Takeout (which would've been a huge step backward.) This is okay (it's been superseded by Google Wallet anyway.)

It's apparently been superseded by Google Wallet for digital goods and discontinued with no replacement for everything else, if I'm reading the announcement right?

---

No, Google is not offering a replacement processing solution for physical goods and services. We’ve partnered with three premier players in the payments industry to offer alternatives for your eCommerce needs. The links below will guide you to more detailed information about each offering, including negotiated discounts for Checkout users:

Payment Processing: Braintree Payments

Hosted storefront: Shopify

Email invoicing: Freshbooks

---

Increasingly often I'm associating Google with poor customer service, poor design and being indifferent to user worries when discontinuing products. Not sure they realize the harm they are causing to their brand, even in the eyes of people who don't actually use the affected products.

Google have gone from (in my opinion) almost flawless execution to a complete mess, they do stuff that drives me away on an almost daily bases.

For example.

I've signed into my Gmail and then visit youtube "Do you want to create a Google+ profile" NO "Ok, we'll ask again later".

Sign into the admin account for google apps I run for a charity I volunteer at while signed into my work account "connect these two accounts?" NO "Ok, we'll ask later".

Reset my android phone, "Play" doesn't work because their is a blocking modal accept terms dialog that isn't on screen, I have to swipe close play then re-open it.

Still can't switch primary domain on a google apps account without setting up a new one, migrating data over and shutting down old one.

Asking me for my mobile number as a 2nd fallback for my password, NO, if I give you that you already know my android phones number and now you know without a shadow of a doubt who my work account belongs to (it's the obsequiousness that gets to me).

Catchall email address still don't work for no apparent reasons.

Documentation is an utter and complete mess for Google Apps (referring to multiple versions of the google apps interface, which change about once an hour anyway).

------

I don't want a google+ account, I don't want to connect all my google accounts as some are work, some are private and some belong to charities and such I volunteer for.

I don't want you to ask me for other personal data all the time.

I will stop using all google services soon if this continues down that path, It's my business I can use anything I want and the level of crap is fast approaching moving all my stuff back in house.

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels like this.

People so vocal about these types of frustrations are the same people who keep refusing to just unify Google's services. You have multiple Google accounts so link them then that's the end of it.

There are much more important things to worry about like Youtube's copyright policies.

By being driven away, what you mean is they are doing things to move forward and you want it to stay the way it was. Since that isn't going to happen you are annoyed and want to bash Google's reputation.

Android, Google Docs, Hangouts, Maps, and yes, Google+ are all amazing free products. Google Checkout is going away because Google Wallet is their new thing. The company is fine and their reputation is fine. A couple of stubborn people are being left behind in a sea of "do this now" notifications because they keep not doing them. Sorry to be so brash. But each of your accounts still remain "separate" after you link them. There are extensive privacy settings for every piece of information you put online using Google+ so it is not a chore to keep charity work separate from work separate from personal. It's actually quite elegant.

I don't understand, is it because you are used to using aliases? Why do you want to fight this so hard?

I think this comment is a great example of the disconnect. You (and I presume a majority of the people working for Google) are not actually able to even comprehend why people might want multiple accounts, or to have separate accounts for their email and their video watching and their blog. He even gives examples in his post, like administering an account for a charity organisation, but somehow things like that are unimaginable to people in the Google bubble.

It's pretty worrying when a company can't even understand the basic motivations behind the actions of their users: how can they possibly weigh up the costs and benefits of forcing account consolidation when they can't even imagine the use cases where consolidating accounts doesn't make sense for users.

I doubt the person you're replying to works at google. His profile says he is a ruby developer and as far as I know we don't use that. Also, his attitude is not particularly common within google.

I didn't mean to imply that I think he works for Google.

>Also, his attitude is not particularly common within google.

So the majority of Google engineers disagree with the policies of the management? Do people internally push back against this stuff (trying to force account consolidation and making everything part of G+), or are people too afraid to speak out? If people aren't happy with it, how far does it have to go before morale drops and people start looking for other jobs?

Google is a big place and there's lots going on, both good and bad. There is lively internal debate and plenty of pushback, but there are also good reasons to stay even when you disagree about a particular issue. There are people who leave, but someone who's unhappy might just switch to a different team.

Brian said it better than I could. We can disagree with parts of organizational policy while still being happy with the whole. This is not unique to Google or even to employers. Any large organization will have things you don't like.

Also, I guess what I was really getting at is that I don't think the attitude is that cavalier in any case. People recognize that having to adopt a new API when we close a product sucks. But that is not the only consideration when deciding whether to continue. That's probably about as much as I can say while remaining vague enough to satisfy my conscience on the point of confidentiality.

Personally I just use different chrome profile for my different accounts. Never had issues with profile merges.

Account consolidation basically means you can switch between accounts without logging out and logging back in again. So there's that. You can still have a bunch of email addresses, the fact you didn't know this shows that you've never been interested in trying it.

I don't even know how else you imagine that it could work, would one of your email addresses just go away? Your post hasn't answered my original question. It supposes I should just know why you don't want to link your Google accounts.

"There are much more important things to worry about like Youtube's copyright policies."

Such statements are stupid because they apply to everything.

You have no idea what's important to me - I have no idea what's important to you. The only thing I can be sure of is that, as one who uses the internet, the only objectively important things (food, shelter, security) are already covered.

I will not speak for the parent - But in my case it is because my business uses Google apps for domains and we have accounts shared amongst various people such as the customer support. This is an account because Google required accounts (not aliases/lists/groups) to access certain resources – but it is shared because multiple people have the need to perform the function. This however results in Google trying to link that account with every support agent's personal Gmail account which gets annoying…

And this in spite of the fact that we do not have any agents actually login to read mail - we manage all of our support in zendesk.

> This is an account because Google required accounts (not aliases/lists/groups) to access certain resources

What type of resources are these, that can't be controlled with an ACL?

Google Checkout is a good example, the founders and the accountant all needed access when we were using it. It's much easier to create one account we all shared - than grant access to all 3 accounts, for all things accounting related.

Additionally some services - and I think Google Checkout was one - do not allow you to grant access to others at all, so if you started such an account in the accountants name, everytime a founder wanted to check out the balance, we’d need to get the accountant’s password.

(Also you never know when signing up weather this will be the case for a service - thankfully I’ve not seen any new "single account" services launch for a couple of years, but I’m still wary.)

Google Checkout allows (allowed) granting access to other accounts.

Cool - so not checkout, there are still plenty of google services that don't/didn't and sorting them out is not easy.

I'm so sick of this mess with Google+ accounts that I'm no longer using gmail, I'm no longer browsing youtube logged in and when I really need to log into any Google service (adwords, webmaster tools etc), I'll just do it in private window and be done with it.

That's the solution I use. It's a bit inconvenient, but all my access to Google services are now done in private windows. This stops all the annoying and potential accidental and unintended linking of accounts or trying to access a service with the wrong login.

Yeah, it hasn't threatened PayPal, but it seems I've seen the Google Checkout on quite a few merchant sites. I guess they all should have integrated Amazon Payments as their "non-PayPal PayPal" instead...

I think the difference between "old Google" and "current Google" is that old Google would have been honest and said "the closest available equivalents are Paypal and Amazon Payments". Instead the migration partnership (presumably with a rev share) is Braintree, which while capable is not really the same sort of product.

It sucks to have to close things down, but sometimes you do, and they gave everybody 6+ months of notice to migrate back in May, but being disingenuous about the best alternative is mealy-mouthed and "un-Googly".

Specifically:

* Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods

* Merchants selling through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) will be unaffected

* Merchants selling physical goods will need to switch to third-party alternatives (see below)

-- https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449

The only thing Google will never shut down is ads.

There are many webdev learning books that used Google Checkout and built an app using their service as an example.. It will be fun for people reading the book after a couple of years about a service that doesn't exists anymore, it'll be like reading some sacred scrolls from times forgotten by today's humans..

Google are generating a lot of uncertainty in their product offerings lately. To innovate you need to know when to call it quits and move onto something else. It's quite clear Google Checkout wasn't the success that Google had hoped it would be and are closing it down to divert resources and cash somewhere else where it might be better utilised. People will complain about this situation, but would you rather Google kept a service running just to appease a few die-hards when it's probably costing them money?

We need stronger and tougher competition in the online payments space. Paypal seriously can't be the only globally working payment and checkout substitute around, maybe Google has a similar service that's stronger and more feature packed up their sleeves? I hope so.

While this seems bad from the title, it's actually pretty good. They are consolidating redundant systems into one system: Google Wallet.

But Google wallet can't be used if you sell physical things.

Yet... I'm Norwegian so the Play Store only contains apps, as such I have no idea if ordering Nexus devices means using Google Wallet or something else entirely, what's the deal there?

Make an app for ordering an item, then?

Or go meta: make an app which makes apps for ordering an item.

What is the difference between google wallet and google checkout again?

Thanks for eating up more than $3000 from my company, Google Checkout.

I'm just starting a new SaaS project. Google was immediately checked off as a source of anything for the project as it is too hard to know if the service will exist in a year.

It will be replaced by 'Google Bitcoin'.

Didn't google give out millions in coupons for using their checkout last holiday season? (maybe it was 2011)

I'd say that signs of an imminent merge with Google Wallet were clearly visible throughout the year...

Yeah, especially this:

May 20th, 2013 Last day to sign up for Google Checkout

Except they arent merging. Goolge is no longer sulporti g pyshical goods.

"Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods"

Except they are. But I'd say we are both correct.

physical != digital

WOW and it is right in the middle of the Christmas RUSH! Never Depend on Google!

wow, I'm glad I didn't use Google checkout for anything important..

i think square has come up with a very good idea thats going to change the payment systems

Don't worry, Google will buy them and shut them down too.

Why would you think that? It's not like Dorsey needs the money, Square are doing genuinely innovative things and I very much doubt they would be interested in selling to BigCorp.

When you take that much VC money you either have to IPO or get acquired by BigCorp. I doubt given Square's land grab that their underlying financials are very attractive so that would rule out IPO for a long time. So.....

If this was because checkout was a commercial failure they need to make that public knowledge. Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering. I'm specifically thinking of Google Voice & Keep.

How would it help you to know that it was a commercial failure? How would knowing that change your conclusion that you can't rely on Google products?

> Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering.

Given history, yeah, you don't want to be seriously dependent on anything non-core.

Personally, I would find it understandable if Google closed checkout because they failed to generate solid profits from it. I saw only after my comment that checkout was deprecated in part because they have another existing product in the same space, Google wallet.

I know that a significant set of people here are saying that this is "end of Google". Actually, this is "beginning of Google". Google must focus on things they are best at: advertisement.

The problem with their approach of having many half finished products that they were actually helping competition: they were discovering and validating market which is then captured by smaller companies.

And my prediction is that the following Google products will probably die out soon:

* Google App Engine - competition is improving at rapid pace and it is hard to keep up without focus.

* Google Blogger - they will probably just make something similar under Google+

* Google Groups

Probably there is more... but these are the one I see.

App Engine — are you serious? New releases every few weeks, quite a few innovations technology-wise and essentially no freeriders. Also, I don't see a lot of competition in terms of equivalent solutions; if at all.

I can be wrong about App Engine. Here is my reasoning...

I think App Engine does not fit nicely into Google's grand vision: which is mobile, social, and search for advertising purposes. So they need to be become profitable soon or they will be shut down.

However they lack enterprise customers and without enterprise and corporate customers it very hard to make things profitable.

Are there any public information about whether appengine is profitable?

Since the pricing change I'd expect most of their customers to be corporate.

AppEngine and, really, all the "Cloud Platform" services from Google are a way to directly monetize the infrastructure that also supports Google's own applications. As such, if they are pricing them above the marginal hardware and support costs they are profitable, since the fixed costs are costs Google bears whether or not it offers them as an external service.

This is wrong. AE is profitable. They have invested so much into AE. Every year at I/O since AE was launched, Google has been presenting the progress in AE. Many of the top companies today are using either AE or EC2 (or both). It is impossible for them to drop AE. They might consider moving away at some point, but in the next 5-10 years it is impossible. But the longer the service remains running, the harder it is for both Google and customers to move away. Eventually, if someone crazy, more competitive comes along, and when customers fall behind they will begin a deprecation and that deprecation period will be years long. When that does happen, Google is no longer attractive. Google will not profit anymore.

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