So what do you do when you’re under pressure to come up with more revenue? You exploit your user base and immitate an already successful business model. Incase you haven’t heard of it yet; Google will be launching Purchases, a new service that allows users to make micropayments within Google Base to buy and sell all sorts of items; as well as videos from Google video and items off the Google Store. Which places them directly in competition with Ebay and possibly paypal in the future.

All you need is a Google Account (gmail or any other email that is setup with google) and you’re good to go. To see some of the sample items that are marked for sale go to Google Base and search for xyzzy. You will notice that the payment is set as “Payment By Google”. Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic has some screenshots of that as well as an exclusive review.

The checkout process is extremely quick and much faster than Paypal’s (page loading times are Google fast) – it also has a much nicer interface making it easier for a user to navigate their way through a checkout and purchase. Overall with Google Base and payments the experience for a user is much nicer than what it is on eBay, a very nice interface and many search features while maintaining the very minimal yet functional interface as expected from Google. I can see that they will be able to maintain this nice interface even as the inventory of items for sale gets much much bigger – their choice of using tags for items as opposed to categories makes it much easier to find items and to fine-tune search results.

It’s highly possible that Google will eventually allow money transfers in addition to selling and buying stuff on Google Base. I still haven’t formed my opinion on this; on one hand Google is global and is likely to allow such transactions from countries that are not allowed on Paypal (example: Middle East). On the other hand; this will only serve to decrease my privacy and add my purchasing patterns into the Google Grid.

What do you think of this? Do you think it will Kill ebay, craig’s list and the likes? And would you use it if it becomes like paypal?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Google, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.