June 20 2006

Google's Paypal competitor... 'Gpay'?

Google today provides no new information about its touted new payments system, but it fuels speculation by saying it's 'different to paypal'.

And so the Google-bus charges on: the new area they wish to colonise is that of online payments!

Paypal is an established and well-functioning way for customers to make small payments both to vendors and to other individuals. While people may gripe about the commission rates they have clearly created and now dominate this market of peer-to-peer fund transfers.

Google are looking to have a system that 'facilitates quicker purchases by a consumer from a marketer' (according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt).

I'm not quite sure what that phrase means, nor how that's different from any other payment mechanism, but then again this appears to have been an off-the-cuff comment while he was at a meeting hosted by Conde Naste's new "Portfolio" business magazine.

Reservations aside, any rumblings from the labs at the GooglePlex has to be taken seriously by retailers: the concern of course is that this'll be tightly linked to Google's ad serving and could be yet another opportunity to charge retailers or skim margin... Watch this space for news as it develops!

See the story from Reuters here

Ian Jindal