GBuy, Google's PayPal killer, is going live--possibly this week, writes
The Wall Street Journal. The service, which would allow consumers to enter a password at a secure site instead of
throwing their credit card information around everywhere, is expected to be available as early as this week, "people briefed on the situation" said. To attract initial customers, Google plans to offer
an unspecified rebate to people who complete their online purchases using GBuy. So what's so great about this service? Google will add little GBuy icons to the items searched for on Google.com that
use the service. The little GBuy guy will bypass the process of going to the merchant's site, and having to maybe register and fill out credit card info. This would cut the buying process by 10 to 15
minutes in some cases, keeping the world's countless impulse buyers from second-guessing themselves. While PayPal, eBay's payment service, has more than 100 million users, it is most often used to pay
for products sold on eBay and is now facing maturing growth. Google will charge merchants a 2.2 percent commission on sales plus 30 cents per transaction, a bit more than PayPal's 1.9 percent plus 30
cents per transaction. However, that rate doesn't include the discount pricing the company will give merchants who participate in AdWords, which will likely be many of them. Merchants who spend money
on AdWords could get the cost of payment processing reduced to nothing, the
's sources said.
Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »
