Back in November 2011, Google announced that it was retiring Google Checkout in favor of Google Wallet. After that announcement, Google Checkout remained operational for another year and a half until Google announced in May of this year that it was no longer accepting new signups for the service. It also said the service would permanently shut down in six months, but now we have an actual date.
Google announced that Google Checkout will shut down once and for all on November 20. Google says the “decision was not made lightly,” but it felt that its “focus is best concentrated on other areas of the payment space.” It knows that a number of online businesses will be impacted by Google Checkout’s closure, and Google has a few options for all retailers that used its service.
Before we get to that, however, you’ll need to know the timeline of Google Checkout’s demise. First, the service will shut down on November 20. This will be the last day that merchants using Google Checkout will be able to charge orders. A day later, on November 21, will be the last day merchants can ship orders. After that, all outstanding orders will be canceled on November 27. Finally, merchants have until December 20 to process refunds.
So, what is Google doing to help merchants transition away from Google Checkout? For starters, it wants any and all merchants selling goods through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) to know that they will remain unaffected through all of this as all transactions will automatically switch over to Google Wallet if they haven’t already. As for merchants selling digital goods, they can also easily switch to Google Wallet. You can find out more here.
The only merchants getting the short end of the stick here are those who sell physical objects as Google will not be replacing Google Checkout with a comparable service. Instead, Google has teamed up with three third-party alternatives to offer Google Checkout refugees discounted services:
While Google Wallet can’t serve all the needs that were fulfilled by Google Checkout, the company does have two services that it wants merchants to use for their business:
Before merchants can start replacing Google Checkout, they’ll have to remove it from their Web site first. To help out with that, Google has a number of helpful tutorials that cover every level of Google Play integration from email invoicing all the way to custom built integration through HTML/XML. You can learn more here.
If you want to learn more about Google Checkout’s death or what to do with your current Web site, you’ll want to check out Google’s exhaustive FAQ here.
[Image: katokazu/YouTube]
