The eBay, PayPal, and Google Fight Club
(Page 1 of 4 )
The eBay, PayPal, and Google rivalry heated up in recent weeks. Google Checkout launched on June 29 after nearly a year of much anticipation, speculation and secrecy. Yet in the week since its launch, Google Checkout has come up against a huge obstacle from one of its biggest AdWords customers: eBay. EBay has banned Google Checkout as an accepted payment service for its sellers.
EBay’s own payment service is PayPal, recently acquired in the last year at the expense of eBay’s own payment service, Billpoint. eBay has likely feared the new Google payment service would rival PayPal. In fact, before the launch, speculators have said that the Google payment service would definitely give PayPal a run for its money, no pun intended. In fact, there were even many eBay sellers hoping this was indeed true. Sites such as PayPalSucks.com and other PayPal-hating sites were gleeful over the idea that another corporate giant wanted a piece of PayPal’s pie.
Nearly to the minute Google Checkout was launched, an eBay employee talked “smack” on the search engine giant’s payment service, still referring to Google Checkout as “GBuy,” as it was called before its launch. The post has since been deleted; but hey folks, this is the Internet! Haven’t you heard of cache? Obviously someone was able to dig up the cached post. Here’s a snippet:
“I find it amusing how the general media is claiming GBuy will be a significant competitor to PayPal based on GBuy having near zero buyers actually using the service vs over 100MM using PayPal. Let's recall something here folks. In its current form, GBuy is a glorified merchant account… Merchants will always prefer to be the merchant of record by maintaining their own merchant account (vs having Google be the seller of record via GBuy). Without that community base, GBuy is simply Greenzap with a 'better' (more evil?) seller proposition...”
Next: The New Contender >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy
/ 8 
