Google To Roll Out GBuy

Will Gbuy be the end of Paypal? No, I dont think so. But wouldnt it be good to have a viable large scale competetor to Paypal. Competition between the two giants would keep systems and services really topnotch.

Opensource attitudes may be great in terms of most things, but not really in terms of finance.

Yes, it would be great... just so long as it isnt Google :)

Look at where this positions them in the buying process:
- Searcher looking for product (at Google/Froogle)
- Advertising Link (On Google)
- Visitor at merchant
- Visitor has question about product, uses Gtalk or Gmail to contact merchant to ask
- Visitor makes purchase
- Purchase paid for using Gbuy (from Google)
- Conversion (tracked by Google)

Apart from actually being the merchant themselves and providing the product/service purchased, they are the entire sales chain, end to end.

If they establish dominence in all of those areas, they could seriously make-or-break a business with the flip of a switch.

Be careful what you wish for..

Yes, they would be the entire sales chain, but can I ask what is wrong with that? I know, prima facia, it is like, "No This Is Bad", but Im not sure why.

Is it really bad to have one organisation manage all of your online utility?

this is a company that is about 7 years old, and as foo said, will pretty much own the internet sales chain. the question then is, what's next? i'm waiting for them to enter the banking industry -- who knows, maybe even roll out their own currency, to ensure that their massive financial ecosystem does not collapse. not too mention if they ever decided to become a trading company and use their data to place trades and bet on sectors....i'm thinking that kind of financial power, on a global scale, would be unprecedented.

i wonder though how they will deal with fraud -- hopefully a bit better than they deal with click fraud.

Yes, of course.

Imagine a business that only has 1 customer or depends significantly on just a handful of customers. If those key customers goes elsewhere, the business is screwed.

Now turn it around.

1 supplier.
If there is only 1 supplier, and that supplier decides they don't like your business, or would rather do business with your competitors instead (maybe because they are offering a bigger comission), what are you going to do then?

EDIT:
Hypothetically, if you have a disagreement with any part of their business operation, (eg, you say to their adwords team they are sending fraudulent clicks give me a refund), they could turn around and say they are not going to supply you with any services at all.
They have you by the balls, so to speak, the cost of switching your entire business operations to another provider is high and could take months, so they can effectivly say to you 'put up or shut up', leaving you with absolutly no room to argue.

And just how are they going to feel about this:

GBuy will also let consumers store their credit-card information on Google.

I still don't see what is so bad to have once organisation ubiquitious in the sales chain so long as:

1. We dont have to use it.
2. There is always competition.

So long as we have those 2 conditions satisfied, we can always change and they allways have to improve.

You would be willing to gamble your entire business (or 75%+ of it), pretty much end to end, on being able to maintain a good relationship with just one supplier?

Assume you had the full range of Google services today, what would you do if Google went bust tommorow? (and how much would that cost you?).

Is it really bad to have one organisation manage all of your online utility?

The old adage concerning Eggs and Baskets comes to mind.

... will this be yet another terrible product/service launch from Google?

I agree with Mat on this. Having another payment method available doesn't need to meen you rely on them. How many retailers allow you to pay by paypal or direct using your credit card?? Gbuy will just add more redundancy so you don't need to depend on Paypay.

As for the other parts of the chain where Google has been mentioned many of these have little relevance in the "eggs in one basket" anology.

Eg. Customer has conversations using Gmail/Gtalk!!! Big deal - Big deal , so you quit your Adwords and Google doesn't let people discuss your product on Gmail???

Google Analytics - This is not explicitly tied to Adwords. Would they threaten to cut you off if you stopped spending on Adwords?? Very unlikely as it would make it less likely that you would go back to them.

suppose for whatever reason, someone or some group of people decide to attack all of google's offices, the company's upper management, and all of the data centers.

if google owns the sales chain, this pretty much means the sales chain has been destroyed.

for the world.

far-fetched scenario? exaggerated a bit? yes, of course. but it should illustrate the point and the danger present when there is an over centralization of resources that people are highly dependent upon.

by the same token, though, this could conceivably add a lot of efficiency to commercial transactions - with all the information that google has, they should be able to help marketers reach their target audience with remarkable precision. plus, if this goes viral (and i have to imagine it will), i think it could allow for web publishers to become an affiliate of google. this would conceivably allow them to offer up relevant products -- not just relevant ads, and would open up other tactics that allow publishers to leverage their relationship with their audience to generate sales (which contextual advertising doesn't really do). for bloggers and web publishers who aren't getting much out of adsense or contextual advertising in general, this could be a real boon, and could give them the profits they need to create more value.

little relevance in the "eggs in one basket" anology.

I respectfully disagree. In terms of previous posts in this thread, placing your whole customer acquisition and purchasing chain in the hands of one source would be a very dangerous action in my opinion. Remember the Florida update and the carnage that wreaked on companies who were reliant on one source of traffic only. Diversification is the key, not only in traffic sources, but also in the various components of the acquisition/purchasing/facilitation chain.

And that is not even touching the data-mining issues as mooted above.

Imagine Google is the entire supply chain. They handle everything for you wonderful widget selling business. One morning you read that Google has purchased several large warehouses, has made sweatheart deals with millions of product manufacturers, will carry stock and ship themselves and will prominently display their ads in the premium positions. They also undercut your prices.

That is a nightmare waiting to happen.

I don't see how this is a step at all in Google taking over the Internet. It's an online payment system, and by the products we've seen Google develop of late, it will probably be a poor one.

The online payment arena is an entirely new area of business. You are dealing with credit cards, merchants, and tons of fraud. This is a company that can't handle click fraud properly and we are expecting them to handle millions of dollars in online transactions a day? This isn't something you just decide to do and money starts pouring in. Not to mention that Paypal is no slouch, and controls a commanding market share with the Ebay community.

So from what I've seen out of Google in their product development, customer service, and other stuff, I just don't see them killing Paypal. Just think of how Google will handle that first call from the lady who had her account phished, or the guy who got scammed for $5,000 in a transaction.

The worry here, in a post I replied to earlier, is that Google might dominate the sales chain. Isn’t it bigger than that?

Google searches.
Gmail.
Googletalk (Today this was integrated into Gmail. Its pretty awesome in potential.
Google Contacts (Again upgraded today, showing neat potential)
Google Calander (This might be huge)

I am not anti-google, but I am not walking into using them without trying to understand the true scope of how they could come to become intimate with my life and the lives of people I interact with. And I haven’t even mentioned Froogle.

A single breach of confidence yields complete access to everything. That is troublesome.

I just hope that Google thinks of countries that Paypal doesn't.

Like freeking Romania :)