Google Promotes Checkout on Homepage
Spotted tonight by John Milan, Google has a promotion for its online shopping product Google Checkout on its homepage - probably the most traffiked web page in the world.
Also there's some interesting speculation over on the Cost Per News site that Google Checkout is set to ramp up:
"I’ve heard rumblings from my sources within the company and from a few of the merchants involved in the Checkout program that something major is on the way… soon."
See also Donna Bogatin and SearchEngineLand, both of whom cite some worries over Google's management of Checkout. On the latter link, Danny Sullivan says that "Google's not thinking clearly about the best way to balance promoting its own products and the trust of users."
More on this story as it develops, as I'm sure it will...
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This is not the same type of disruptive offering that brought Google success.
No, this is Google starting to really leverage the position they have built to date. I suppose not strange for a dominant market player to utilise it's resources for its own good. How does this fit with 'do no evil'?
I wouldn't describe this as 'evil', in fact it's probably sound business sense to leverage the Google homepage to promote their products. I suppose though there are *some* parallels between this and Microsoft putting IE in the start page of Windows - in the sense that Google is using a dominant platform to push its own product over smaller, less fortunate e-commerce services.
Heck, I was curious enough to click on it and check it out :)
My question is, with Google stock at $504 per share, couldn't they do better than $10? Make it $50 and I'm trying it.
No John, it would look even worse. Reminds me the first Batman movie starred by Michael Keaton. Joker (Jack Nicholson) was spreading money from air to the people of Gotham City! Same here..
Google homepage placements are a sure shot way to boost traffic to a service. It has worked extremely well in the past. For stats/graph of the effect, take a look at:
http://blog.compete.com/2007/01/07/technorati-google-blog-search-compete/?int=1032
It certainly makes sense now that probably they have a degree of critical mass. I used it myself recently and didn't have a good experience. Needless to say I won't be using it any time soon.
#7 Sam - do they? Because from a $10 off $10 offer that is running that either means:
a. they haven't gotten past the tech set
or
b. they want to crush the hell out of paypal.
I posted about this (click my name) this morning and now it appears there are ads for gmail within gmail chat applet.
Also technically remember that GC is a wholly owned sub of Google.
I think they have a real big hill to climb with paypal being who they are. people arn't going to buy just cause a site has a google checkout...
Anybody can share their experience on using google CheckOut? is it comparable with PayPal? How popular is that in Worldwide?
This is, as it should be, a fu*king smart business move. Google has put themselves in the catbird seat, and - akin to Apple - has won over the consumer with elegance/relevance and clean, simple design. The interesting question (to me) is this: as Google increases the "noise" (commercial bias, product creep,...) will there be a point of deflation in the eyes of the consumer where the soul leaves the body.
The public company thirst for growth and the engineering intensity on new products have to create an enormous pressure to push things up into their core interface.
I think the consumer goes to Google to be sent somewhere else, with an expectation of relevance and quality. Sure they can (and arguably should) put their own stuff "alongside", but when they take over the space and leave out other consumer desired options, the cracks start to form, imho.
This is a leading example.