Checkout Gets Pricy

Well it had to happen. Google Checkout, which offered an alternative to PayPal for small e-commerce sites and was significantly cheaper have just announced they are putting up their prices from 5th May.

Under the old scheme they charged you 1.5% of the transaction value plus 15p. The new structure starts at 3.4% plus 20p for the first £1,500 per month and on a sliding scale after that down to 1.4% plus 20p over £55,000 per month. So it will now be identical to PayPal's scheme.

I can't say I'm surprised to be honest: Google needed to undercut PayPal initially to gain market share. Now they've got enough traders using Google Checkout to rely on their reputation rather than price.

For Opus our e-commerce solution relies on PayPal, mainly because it was written before Google Checkout came along, and there's now little incentive in upgrading it to support Google Checkout too unless we get a customer dead set on using it.