August 22 2006

Retailers' resistance to Google Checkout

As predicted here when we covered the release of Google Checkout, retailers look to shun the service over concerns about loss of ownership of their customers (according to a recent survey quoted on e-consultancy.com)

At the end of June we reported on Google's Checkout and we commented at the time:

The commendably zippy video tour will ring alarm bells with retailers! This shows clearly how a retailer's brand and lovingly-crafted website is reduced to no more than a paid-for, text product link with the 'checkout basket' logo to indicate the mother of all "Buy it now" opportunities. There are no upsell opportunities, brand messages or other retailing opportunities. It's a world in a few lines of text.

Linus Gregoriadis, writing on the e-consultancy.com blog quotes research by Piper Jaffray at the eTail conference that:

An overwhelming 81% of 30 online retailers surveyed at the 15th Annual eTail Conference in Philadelphia indicated that they "will probably not implement Google Checkout primarily due to concern about ceding customer ownership to Google".

Now, a 30-company survey is not the last word in comprehensive coverage, but the survey is an opportunity to voice a collective concern.

Google clearly wants to have a finger in every pie and a stake in the pie shop, the flour mill and the abbatoir, while also owning the exclusive secret recipe to GooglePies [tm]. Who can blame them?

For each large company that has concerns or that holds back there's a swarm (or whatever the collective noun might be for smaller etailers - ed) of companies who'll be pleased to get more coverage.

Rather than villifying Google, retailers should be focusing upon their product offering, market relevance and pricing/service propositions. In the fierce arms race in which we find ourselves there's no point railing against the technology: it's who's going to use the technology against you that constitutes the biggest danger.

Ian Jindal. e-consultancy blog.