The German judge votes 5.8 out of 6 for this one. Today’s New York Times Technology feature story talks about Google Checkout’s quest for market share and right there on the front section is a photo of one of our favorite customers, Steve from Budgetvideogames.com (Steve sells a lot of cool video games such as Need For Speed for the PSP).

The article is a good overview of Google Checkout, its benefits and recent promotions designed to accelerate adoption among sellers and buyers. ChannelAdvisor got a great plug with a quote from Scot on the Google Checkout AdWords effect.

The NYT could not have picked a better example of a poster boy for Google Checkout: Steve’s a very savvy merchant who’s products and ASP (Average Selling Price) is a near-perfect fit for Google’s $10 off $30 promotion.

Steven Grossberg, who sells video games online from his home in Wellington, Fla., recently sent an enticing offer to 20,000 customers: $10 off any purchase over $30 using a new payment service, Google Checkout.

Traffic on his site more than tripled, and best of all, he said, Google picked up the tab for the promotion.

“I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “I’m selling the product. Google is getting tons of customers to sign up for Checkout. Customers are happy because they are getting a monster deal.”

He’s a little bummed though that the story did not include any reference to his Budgetvideogames.com eCommerce site (Levis, Toys R Us and Timberland were highlighted). Rightfully so.

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Scot is reporting some very interesting Google Checkout adoption statistics at eBay Strategies from a Comscore conference call hosted by Bob Peck.

That follows a post on TheStreet.com last week on Google’s Checkout Challenges with several buyers reporting that products purchased with Google Checkout never arrived or transactions were canceled.

Google Checkout has seen many glitches, says one manager at Checkout partner Starbucksstore.com. Purchases made through Google Checkout often face delays trickling through to the vendor’s site, meaning that items can be out of stock when the purchase finally comes through. Crediting customer accounts has also been a problem.

“It hasn’t been perfect, and it is still in its early stages,” says Jae Kim, the general manager of Starbucksstore.com. “But I think it is a great addition to our site, and despite the occasional hiccup, it has been without problems for the most part.”

“It’s not unusual in e-commerce for very popular items to sell out, particularly during the holidays, and there are many reasons for this,” a Google spokeswoman says. “We believe less than 1% of orders through Google Checkout during the holiday season have been canceled by the merchant because the item is out of stock.”

The concerns are no so much around the maturity and capabilities of the Google Checkout API (integration) but more buyer expectations after successfully completing checkout through a third-party payment service (PayPal, BillMeLater, Google Checkout). Here merchants receive an order confirmation from Google Checkout and then have the ability to cancel the sale for a variety of reasons (out of stock, fraud risk), upsetting the buyer who’s probably already announced with pride to friends & family that he got the deal of a lifetime using Google Checkout.

The challenge for payment services is how many failed orders does it take to join Michael Rubino in TheStreet’s article and avoid Google Checkout or PayPal? Will Google have to define an acceptable level of cancellations for merchants to keep offering this option to their buyers? Ultimately it is of course in the merchant’s interest to maximize successful sales through Google to minimize processing fees and yield AdWords credits. And to keep driving repeat sales from buyers who realize that it’s actually quite cool and handy to use a single service to pay for all online purchase.

And speaking of throwing rocks in that article… here’s a recent comment by an eBay PowerSeller on an eBay forum on PayPal woes:

PayPal is a fantastic system for micropayments, and operates well 99% of the time, they, too, sometimes make mistakes. If you look at our feedback rating you’ll see that we have over 13,600 unique positive feedbacks, with over 96,000 positive feedbacks in total, as compared to only 298 negatives. While some of those negatives were well deserved because we accidentally screwed something up, the ones that really irk us resulted from when someone became extremely peeved with us because they had paid us via PayPal, and we didn’t ship their order. The reason this happens is because PayPal’s system isn’t 100% perfect, and sometimes they simply fail to tell us that a buyer made payment. Then we end up looking bad, when we actually had no way of knowing that the payment had been made. All that we ask is that if your order hasn’t been shipped for any reason, please contact us first, before posting a negative.

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Although by no means a comprehensive survey or scientific analysis, W3 Counters is showing the Firefox browser now with a 25% market share while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is at 65% (based on user stats reported by around 4,000 websites).

Pretty significant gain and exciting to see some competition (and innovation) back in the browser market. More importantly for merchants this means that it is absolutely critical to test the buyer’s shopping experience in both browsers to make sure your products look good and your checkout works flawless.

Here are a few Firefox extensions that you may find useful for managing and enhancing your content:

• Web Developer — Toolbar that comes in very handy for developing and validating HTML let’s say for an eBay Ad or your eCommerce site.

• IE Tab — Open a site in Internet Explorer right within a tab in Firefox. Very useful for checking that your page looks good in both Firefox and Microsoft’s browser.

• FireBug — This extension gets you really into the details of website development, enabling you to examine and fix your HTML, Javascript, CSS and more.

• PDF Download — Choose whether to download or view a PDF in your browser. Great little utility especially if you don’t want to look at a PDF but simply store it for later (yes, I know, doesn’t really have to do anything with web development, but it’s so darn handy that I had to sneak it in here).

Got other Firefox extensions you can’t live without?

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This week the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google made a clear statement saying that any type of paid or exchanged link is almost as good as no link.

Their general advice:

Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

They mention that tactics like linkbait and good content should be some of the primary things that you focus on instead.  Anything that helps improve the content on your site such that it contributes something to the greater community should give others a reason to link to you.  Obviously any links you earn are still important, it’s just paid or exchanged links that are not really useful.

One thing that users should keep in mind, however… All search engines are not created equal. What doesn’t work in Google, sometimes works in Yahoo.

Happy SEOing.

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Well we’re definitely in the home stretch of the e-commerce super-bowl season right now. It’s starting to become a well known e-commerce fact that Monday’s are typically the busiest e-commerce day of the week. An interesting commentary on society I’m sure - rather than facing the doldrums of another week at work, we go to the office, log on and…start shopping! This year is especially interesting, as the last Monday of the season falls a full week away from Christmas - just enough time to get that Playstation 3 by ground shipping. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers take that risk on Monday and break some e-commerce records.

Anyway, as promised in my last post, today I thought I’d talk a little about security, specifically as it applies to our Merchant and Pro products. I’m not going to pull a CNN here and broadcast exact specifics (”as you can see here, the 3rd cavalry is going to launch their surprise attack on this position in exactly 10 minutes…”), but there is a high level discussion we can have here that doesn’t give away the secret sauce.

First of all, let me stress that security of our data is something we take very seriously here at CA. Is any system foolproof? Of course not, we’d be fools to think otherwise. We do however use well established industry practices to secure your data, and have subjected ourselves to numerous internal and external security audits to validate our practices. With that said, we are always working to get even better.

Physical Security
First and foremost, there are the servers themselves. Our servers aren’t hanging out in a garage or under Marshall Smith’s desk, they live in a dedicated data center. If you’ve never seen a datacenter, they look a lot like this. If there’s a part a part of reality that’s straight out of a sci-fi movie, it’s a data center. Walking into one you could easily convince yourself that computers have taken over the world and you are the last human on earth. Time to wakeup and feed your master.

Here’s a picture of a Google Data Center I found on, well Google:

(more…)

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