I was reading my daily digest of Slashdot stories this afternoon and found this little article about a survey by JP Morgan Investments that said Google Checkout had poor customer satisfaction verses PayPal.

In June 2006, Google released the beta–meaning it’s the first release of a computer program and will have continious updates and many bugs that will be found by users to be fixed–version of Google Checkout. Google Checkout is a pioneering way to shop online. You shop and add items to you Google Checkout shopping cart and when you’re ready to checkout, Google Checkout uses the financial and contact information you provided to pay for your items. The store never sees your information [except, of course, shipping information].

According to the Arstechnica article, many customers have been complaining giving Google Checkout a ‘Fair’ or ‘Poor’ rating 18% percent of the time.

The way I see it, the press shouldn’t be so harsh on Google Checkout just because of the bugs and such that rittle the service. The main complaint is the delays in the actual process time of the checkouts. These delays are caused by the anti-fraud review performed on transactions. In a PC World article from August 2006: “[Google Checkout users] applaud antifraud efforts, users of this high-profile service…say Google needs to speed up the review proces…” This is the whole point of the beta software, to find and fix bugs.

Although, I can also see where the press is coming from by critizing Google. Unlike Gmail–Google’s highly rated, high profile e-mail service–when they allowed only randomly invited and member invited users to join the service to assist with bug reports and such, Google jumped the gun with Google Checkout. It gained 6% of the market share against their rival PayPal in less than 6 months with the use of numerous promotions.

Google Checkout has also been complimented by many people saying without the checkout delay, the service would end up killing it’s rival PayPal. It’s a matter of opinion. I don’t plan on using the service anytime soon.