Traffic to Google Checkout has overtaken that to rival online payment service PayPal for the first couple of weeks in December.
Hitwise's Robin Goad finds that the payment service has taken a marginal lead, though this doesn't necessarily indicate that more people are making payments through Google Checkout.
As you would expect, the majority (59.1%) of PayPal's traffic comes from parent company eBay, 12.4% from Google, and just 2.2% from shopping and classified sites.
Google Checkout, by contrast, gets more traffic from retailers, with 45.3% coming from the shopping and classifieds category.
The downstream traffic from both payment providers tells another story - 43.4% visit another shopping and classifieds site after Google Checkout, compared with just 26.7% for PayPal.
This suggests that many more people are abandoning their purchases on Google Checkout than on PayPal.
User numbers for Google Checkout are unavailable, but PayPal recently announced that it had almost 35m user accounts in Europe, where it processed $8.4bn (£4.3bn) in payments last year.
Related stories:
Google Checkout – a paid search optimisation tactic?
PayPal targets new sites via virtual payments
Google Checkout struggles against etailer resistance
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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Internet Marketing Manager at Optimised Media
5:14PM on 22nd December 2007
I believe Google Checkout still offers free payment processing so this is a very strong selling point. The higher number of abandoned carts is probably linked to the fact that people who actually start bidding on ebay (its main source of traffic) have actually made the buying decision already.
11:35PM on 8th January 2008
Google have adwords as a great weapon in their armoury. But paypal is far superior. We send our customers a text on delivery of our order....but, because of the way Goog checkout works, we can't due to their prohibitive privacy policies...we understand keeping data secret, but preventing us getting a customer's mobile number so we can give them a value added service is, frankly, pretty outdated and pointless.
8:38AM on 9th January 2008
If Google had passed Paypal then numbers would be more than public. Since Google is public company cannot diclose negative data. I believe PP is far superior, I registered for GC and I find it horrible.
11:05AM on 23rd October 2008
Google checkout is great but still paypal has more advantage like they are accepting payment from 55 countries and google only from two.