Since everyone mentioned paypal and not Google Checkout, I'll mention the latter. The place that I work for currently has their own shopping kart which is provided by a e-commerce company, which provides our company with all the addresses, credit card data and so on, sufficient to be able to do all of our own billing. The kart system gives us authorizations on the cards and then it's up to us to permanently take out the funds within a timeframe.
Then we also offer the use of Google Checkout. The customer has to sign up with Google and enters their credit card information and addresses into their Google account. In terms of whether someone could hack into that data, is really a matter of how safe Google accounts are. I believe our company hasn't had any problems with it so far. Then Google sends you basic data like what to ship, where to ship it to, and they tell you whether the card is `chargeable`, basically like an authorization. You can then go to your google checkout admin area and request that the cards be charged, which transfers the funds to your bank account or whatever.
Google also handles sending out a preliminary order confirmation email to the customer, telling them that their order is placed and gives them a google order number. The customer can also go to google and log in to request order status, which then sends email to our company saying that such-and-such a person wants to know order status. So then we can email back. Each google customer typically gets an automatically assigned virtual email address, which looks somewhat like a hash-table key. Normally our website generates tracking data for orders and puts that somewhere for customer's to log into our site to get to it, or emails it to them, but this isn't integrated with Google. Also google only has the ability to capture the full authorized amount on the card, you can't do partial captures with might sometimes be desirable. To do partial captures we have to contact the customer directly for their credit card info, since we don't have access to that.
One benefit is return customers (to any site which uses google checkout) don't have to keep typing in their credit card and address information, and since it's all hosted in one place you might consider that safer than giving out information to many websites. I would say only about 10-20% of our orders are from customers who chose to use Google Checkout versus our own shopping kart checkout. But this is for a business making several million dollars per year so it's not as if Google isn't reliable or dependable. There is, however, very minimal customer service support should you need it.
I think I would trust Google Checkout more than Paypal but that's highly biased based on how much spam there is for paypal and sometimes paypal is thought of as a cheap-n-easy solution for companies that aren't big or reliable enough to have a `proper` checkout system.
Then we also offer the use of Google Checkout. The customer has to sign up with Google and enters their credit card information and addresses into their Google account. In terms of whether someone could hack into that data, is really a matter of how safe Google accounts are. I believe our company hasn't had any problems with it so far. Then Google sends you basic data like what to ship, where to ship it to, and they tell you whether the card is `chargeable`, basically like an authorization. You can then go to your google checkout admin area and request that the cards be charged, which transfers the funds to your bank account or whatever.
Google also handles sending out a preliminary order confirmation email to the customer, telling them that their order is placed and gives them a google order number. The customer can also go to google and log in to request order status, which then sends email to our company saying that such-and-such a person wants to know order status. So then we can email back. Each google customer typically gets an automatically assigned virtual email address, which looks somewhat like a hash-table key. Normally our website generates tracking data for orders and puts that somewhere for customer's to log into our site to get to it, or emails it to them, but this isn't integrated with Google. Also google only has the ability to capture the full authorized amount on the card, you can't do partial captures with might sometimes be desirable. To do partial captures we have to contact the customer directly for their credit card info, since we don't have access to that.
One benefit is return customers (to any site which uses google checkout) don't have to keep typing in their credit card and address information, and since it's all hosted in one place you might consider that safer than giving out information to many websites. I would say only about 10-20% of our orders are from customers who chose to use Google Checkout versus our own shopping kart checkout. But this is for a business making several million dollars per year so it's not as if Google isn't reliable or dependable. There is, however, very minimal customer service support should you need it.
I think I would trust Google Checkout more than Paypal but that's highly biased based on how much spam there is for paypal and sometimes paypal is thought of as a cheap-n-easy solution for companies that aren't big or reliable enough to have a `proper` checkout system.