It's apparently been superseded by Google Wallet for digital goods and discontinued with no replacement for everything else, if I'm reading the announcement right?
No, Google is not offering a replacement processing solution for physical goods and services. We’ve partnered with three premier players in the payments industry to offer alternatives for your eCommerce needs. The links below will guide you to more detailed information about each offering, including negotiated discounts for Checkout users:
Payment Processing: Braintree Payments
Hosted storefront: Shopify
Email invoicing: Freshbooks
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Increasingly often I'm associating Google with poor customer service, poor design and being indifferent to user worries when discontinuing products. Not sure they realize the harm they are causing to their brand, even in the eyes of people who don't actually use the affected products.
Google have gone from (in my opinion) almost flawless execution to a complete mess, they do stuff that drives me away on an almost daily bases.
For example.
I've signed into my Gmail and then visit youtube "Do you want to create a Google+ profile" NO "Ok, we'll ask again later".
Sign into the admin account for google apps I run for a charity I volunteer at while signed into my work account "connect these two accounts?" NO "Ok, we'll ask later".
Reset my android phone, "Play" doesn't work because their is a blocking modal accept terms dialog that isn't on screen, I have to swipe close play then re-open it.
Still can't switch primary domain on a google apps account without setting up a new one, migrating data over and shutting down old one.
Asking me for my mobile number as a 2nd fallback for my password, NO, if I give you that you already know my android phones number and now you know without a shadow of a doubt who my work account belongs to (it's the obsequiousness that gets to me).
Catchall email address still don't work for no apparent reasons.
Documentation is an utter and complete mess for Google Apps (referring to multiple versions of the google apps interface, which change about once an hour anyway).
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I don't want a google+ account, I don't want to connect all my google accounts as some are work, some are private and some belong to charities and such I volunteer for.
I don't want you to ask me for other personal data all the time.
I will stop using all google services soon if this continues down that path, It's my business I can use anything I want and the level of crap is fast approaching moving all my stuff back in house.
I suspect I'm not the only one who feels like this.
People so vocal about these types of frustrations are the same people who keep refusing to just unify Google's services. You have multiple Google accounts so link them then that's the end of it.
There are much more important things to worry about like Youtube's copyright policies.
By being driven away, what you mean is they are doing things to move forward and you want it to stay the way it was. Since that isn't going to happen you are annoyed and want to bash Google's reputation.
Android, Google Docs, Hangouts, Maps, and yes, Google+ are all amazing free products. Google Checkout is going away because Google Wallet is their new thing. The company is fine and their reputation is fine. A couple of stubborn people are being left behind in a sea of "do this now" notifications because they keep not doing them. Sorry to be so brash. But each of your accounts still remain "separate" after you link them. There are extensive privacy settings for every piece of information you put online using Google+ so it is not a chore to keep charity work separate from work separate from personal. It's actually quite elegant.
I don't understand, is it because you are used to using aliases? Why do you want to fight this so hard?
I think this comment is a great example of the disconnect. You (and I presume a majority of the people working for Google) are not actually able to even comprehend why people might want multiple accounts, or to have separate accounts for their email and their video watching and their blog. He even gives examples in his post, like administering an account for a charity organisation, but somehow things like that are unimaginable to people in the Google bubble.
It's pretty worrying when a company can't even understand the basic motivations behind the actions of their users: how can they possibly weigh up the costs and benefits of forcing account consolidation when they can't even imagine the use cases where consolidating accounts doesn't make sense for users.
I doubt the person you're replying to works at google. His profile says he is a ruby developer and as far as I know we don't use that. Also, his attitude is not particularly common within google.
I didn't mean to imply that I think he works for Google.
>Also, his attitude is not particularly common within google.
So the majority of Google engineers disagree with the policies of the management? Do people internally push back against this stuff (trying to force account consolidation and making everything part of G+), or are people too afraid to speak out? If people aren't happy with it, how far does it have to go before morale drops and people start looking for other jobs?
Google is a big place and there's lots going on, both good and bad. There is lively internal debate and plenty of pushback, but there are also good reasons to stay even when you disagree about a particular issue. There are people who leave, but someone who's unhappy might just switch to a different team.
Brian said it better than I could. We can disagree with parts of organizational policy while still being happy with the whole. This is not unique to Google or even to employers. Any large organization will have things you don't like.
Also, I guess what I was really getting at is that I don't think the attitude is that cavalier in any case. People recognize that having to adopt a new API when we close a product sucks. But that is not the only consideration when deciding whether to continue. That's probably about as much as I can say while remaining vague enough to satisfy my conscience on the point of confidentiality.
Account consolidation basically means you can switch between accounts without logging out and logging back in again. So there's that. You can still have a bunch of email addresses, the fact you didn't know this shows that you've never been interested in trying it.
I don't even know how else you imagine that it could work, would one of your email addresses just go away? Your post hasn't answered my original question. It supposes I should just know why you don't want to link your Google accounts.
I will not speak for the parent - But in my case it is because my business uses Google apps for domains and we have accounts shared amongst various people such as the customer support. This is an account because Google required accounts (not aliases/lists/groups) to access certain resources – but it is shared because multiple people have the need to perform the function. This however results in Google trying to link that account with every support agent's personal Gmail account which gets annoying…
And this in spite of the fact that we do not have any agents actually login to read mail - we manage all of our support in zendesk.
Google Checkout is a good example, the founders and the accountant all needed access when we were using it. It's much easier to create one account we all shared - than grant access to all 3 accounts, for all things accounting related.
Additionally some services - and I think Google Checkout was one - do not allow you to grant access to others at all, so if you started such an account in the accountants name, everytime a founder wanted to check out the balance, we’d need to get the accountant’s password.
(Also you never know when signing up weather this will be the case for a service - thankfully I’ve not seen any new
"single account" services launch for a couple of years, but I’m still wary.)
"There are much more important things to worry about like Youtube's copyright policies."
Such statements are stupid because they apply to everything.
You have no idea what's important to me - I have no idea what's important to you. The only thing I can be sure of is that, as one who uses the internet, the only objectively important things (food, shelter, security) are already covered.
I'm so sick of this mess with Google+ accounts that I'm no longer using gmail, I'm no longer browsing youtube logged in and when I really need to log into any Google service (adwords, webmaster tools etc), I'll just do it in private window and be done with it.
That's the solution I use. It's a bit inconvenient, but all my access to Google services are now done in private windows. This stops all the annoying and potential accidental and unintended linking of accounts or trying to access a service with the wrong login.
Yeah, it hasn't threatened PayPal, but it seems I've seen the Google Checkout on quite a few merchant sites. I guess they all should have integrated Amazon Payments as their "non-PayPal PayPal" instead...
