« eBay Selling: New eBay Ruling Allows Video Links From Your Auctions | Main | Coins On eBay: Auction A Coin On eBay US »
April 29, 2007
eBay & Google At War Over Check Out Services
eBay and Google are fiercely fighting the checkout payment battle. The best-known payment system on the Net is PayPal, of course, which was bought by eBay years ago. If you're selling on eBay you most likely have a PayPal account and use it often. PayPal has evolved over the years and become ever more user friendly and is a big revenue maker for eBay. With 100+ million accounts, taking on PayPal is not for the faint of hear.
Google, though, is certainly an active and dynamic company and is constantly testing new products and services. One of those is the Google Checkout which is a direct competitor to PayPal and, if successful, will certainly cut into PayPal/eBay revenues. Since PayPal has a several-years lead in the market, how can Google possibly compete? One way is by allowing Google Checkout logos for advertisers on Google AdWords.
The Checkout logo certainly does draw the eye. And Google has improved this eye-candy appeal considerably:
Enter Yahoo ...
Yahoo & eBay have done deals in the past and Yahoo has chosen - no big surprise - to promote PayPal in its paid search. No mystery, considering the intense rivalry between Yahoo & Google. It's smart of Yahoo because the eBay market isn't exactly Yahoo's target marketl, although they certainly overlap. Google Y Yahoo, though, are competing for the exact identical searchers - and currently, Google is winning.
I have to say that the Yahoo checkout symbol isn't all that impressive. It's too much like the older Google one. Surely Yahoo will jazz that up in future months? It doesn't attract the eye the way the Google logo does.
How will this affect you and me? I don't know at this point but usually when the giants are squabbling, there's some benefit in it for us. That just's like the current search engine war between Google, Yahoo & MSN. Yahoo has offered free credits in the past and MSN is still doing so. It's not too late to get your $50 MSN search credit that was mentioned in our last issue, although I'm told that it's ending soon.
Posted by SydneyJohnston at April 29, 2007 3:09 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.auction-genius-course.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/487
