Google have now confirmed through their ecommerce blog that their payment facility (Google Checkout) will be closing on November 20th 2013, with the final date for Merchant refunds through Checkout a month later on December 20th.
This has some far reaching impacts for merchants in terms of changing websites, finding alternative payment mechanisms and the loss of the incidental benefits from Checkout such as the inclusion of review stars from Checkout in merchant’s store and product ratings.
It is strongly advised that Merchants read the full article to understand the process and digest the implications for your store. We are aware that a number of our clients have Checkout transactions that are a reasonably significant % of their overall online sales. The loss of this mechanism may need to be compensated for.
It is not clear from the release why Google are dropping this. We assume that commercially it hasn’t worked out as expected, but given that no new Checkout accounts were allowed after May this year, perhaps not altogether surprising that this was the next move.
