As announced on their blog, the Google Checkout team is hosting a Boston Tea Party-style protest fest during eBay Live with free food, free drinks, free music and better yet (after a long day) free massages.

Are you an online seller attending eBay Live! in Boston this week? If so, join us for a celebration of user choice at the Google Checkout Freedom Party on Thursday night (6/14). To get to the party, just hop on the classic Beantown trolley in front of the Boston Convention Center and follow the freedom trail to the Old South Meeting House. We’ll use the same spot where revolutionaries launched the Boston Tea Party to celebrate freedom with free food, free drinks, free live music — even free massages. Join us and bring a friend. RSVP here.

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If you’re looking planning on attending the e-Consultancy ‘eCommerce Solutions Supplier Showcase‘ in central London this week, we look forward to seeing you there!

e-Consultancy has kindly invited us to present our Marketplaces, Paid Search and Comparison Shopping technology solutions to the audience and we will also be touching on the new Google Checkout payment solution for online retailers.

The event kicks off at 1:30pm on Thursday 10th May at 76 Portland Place, London. ChannelAdvisor’s slot is at 4:30 - 5:00pm, followed by drinks and networking. If you’d like to come along and meet some of the CA team, register here for your place.

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I have just returned from our annual Catalyst UK conference in London and similar to Catalyst U.S. in Pinehurst it was a marvelous event (we should all be saying marvelous more often). and a great opportunity to meet online retailers, partners and solution providers (photos will be available shortly).

First of all, kudos go out to the City of London, the spectacular weather, the Royal Horseguard hotel (the venue for the event) and of course our marketing team in the UK. If you want to work with kick-***, gung-ho, we-leave-no-stone-unturned people check out the five openings available in our Richmond office. Wait — there’s even a job right on the marketing team!

Scot posted some great impressions and key take-aways, but here are a few of my own thoughts:

– Google Checkout is going international and had its first public presentation of Google Checkout in the UK at the Catalyst conference, reviewing both the mechanics and business benefits of this third-party checkout solution (a lot of which was covered during our joint webinar with Google yesterday - a recording should be available shortly). Should you do it? Read Scot’s posts from June last year for some good insights (Google Checkout is Live!, Why Should Consumers Care?).

(more…)

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I’m suspecting that most people reading this will be aware of the big news from Google just over a week ago - Google Checkout is now available in the UK.

If you are an online retailer then we recommend you take a look at how Google Checkout could benefit your business. Check out my blog post from last week for the details - but the simple fact that payment processing is completely free for the rest of 2007 should a good enough reason to give it a go. Over the last week we’ve seen a significant portion of our clients’ customers opting to use Google Checkout to complete their online purchases (probably due to the £10 off £30 promo) which means these buyers now have Google Checkout accounts and will be looking for more places to shop with Google Checkout online. Make sure you’re one of the places they can shop by offering the Google Checkout payment option on your website as soon as possible.

For those of you who came along to our Catalyst conference in central London this past week, you will have witnessed the first live public demonstration of Google Checkout by Rob Swerling of Google. Rob has kindly agreed to join ChannelAdvisor on Monday at 2pm for a live online webinar, demonstrating the Google Checkout technology with a specific focus on the benefits for retailers.

Please feel free to join us for this informative webinar, by clicking on this link to register. We look forward to you joining us and Google on Monday.

p.s. if you can’t make 2pm, be sure to register anyway and we’ll send you a link to a recorded version of the webinar later this week.

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We’re excited to greet our Friday blog readers with some very exciting news!

In the last few hours, Google has rolled out its popular payment method, Google Checkout in the UK.

And of course, ChannelAdvisor has been working closely with Google UK for several months to ensure we were able to support this new payment option from day one. Which is great news for our UK clients who will be among the first retailers in the UK to be able to take advantage of all its benefits. Check out our official press release.

If you want to learn more now, read on….

What is Google Checkout?
Google Checkout is an alternative checkout flow that is designed to be fast, easy and secure. Industry data shows that a whopping 63% of checkouts are abandoned by shoppers AFTER they start to checkout. That’s a lot of lost sales. So, Google set out to come up with a cleaner, easier checkout process that would ensure more of these shoppers turn into buyers. Enter Google Checkout.

Google Checkout launched in the US in June 2006 and ChannelAdvisor offered immediate support then as well. Over the past 9 months our US clients have given us really positive feedback about the impact on their conversions, as well as their improved click-through rates on their Adwords listings.

So, let’s take a look at exactly what Google has announced so far:

For merchants:

• FREE payment processing for merchants for the rest of 2007 !
• After the free payment processing expires (i.e. Jan 1st 2008) get £10 free payment processing for every £1 spent on Google Adwords
• A very competitive 1.5% + 15p charged on all transactions that fall outside the above two conditions
• Free fraud protection technology

For buyers:

• A crazy £10 off any order over £30 if paid for using Google Checkout!

This is incredible news for both merchants and buyers. If you’re a merchant selling online then we recommend you take a look at how Google Checkout can help you to save a ton of money on processing fees.

And don’t forget that it should also improve the ROI of your paid search campaigns.

How? Simple. If you are a Google Adwords advertiser and you accept Google Checkout on your website, a snazzy Google Checkout badge will appear on your Adwords listings. We’ve seen this positively impact buyer click-through rates (CTR) when compared to listings without the badge - which means, assuming an identical bid amount, your ads will appear higher than competitor’s that aren’t accepting Google Checkout.

Want to learn more?
Here are some great Google resources to find out more:

Google Checkout official website - http://www.google.co.uk/checkout

Google Checkout blog - http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/

Meet the Google Team!
And if you want to hear from Google in the flesh, then be sure to make it along to our Catalyst conference next Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th to meet the team from Google UK and hear a presentation from Robert Swerling, Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google. We have a few seats left so please register and join us if you can!

Sign up for our webinar
If you’re not able to make it along to Catalyst, then be sure to register for our upcoming webinar, “Google Checkout UK Explained” which takes place at 2pm GMT on Monday 23rd April. Google will be co-presenting this webinar with ChannelAdvisor so expect lots of great content and a sizable Q&A section! Details on how to register for this webinar will be posted to the blog very soon.

Watch this space for lots more info!

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