Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout, BillMeLater, Amazon? Who is Next?
There has been a lot of buzz this year around the growing number of alternative payment methods that have been popping up, but a world that was once heavily dominated by PayPal is starting to get some heavy hitters wanting to end that domination. What does this mean for consumers? What does this mean for retailers? There are many interesting posts out there today about this space and what could be coming down the road. Here are some very interesting posts to read -
Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor - eBay Strategies Blog
Michael Arrington, CEO of TechCrunch - TechCrunch
How does the saying go “Show me the money?”
MJ
On a related topic concerning making shopping easier for frequent eccommece shoppers, it’s time for “common” registration. Like the common application for college, we could simplify and stem customer frustration if a handful of leading catalogers would develop a common registration form for ordering/email sign up. I’m not 100% sure what the best way to make this work would be, but one method would be that the first time you registered at a site that uses common registration, you’d get a unique id, which you could then enter at any other site that uses common registration, rather than filling in all the same information again. Your info would then pop up and you could make any change you needed to make and say whether it was a one time change or a change to your common registration. In addition, just like is true with the common application, if a site needed a piece of “uncommon” information, they would just add that question after the common registation, so sites could still get any unique information they absolutely had to have.
I have a follow up question? Are the alternative payments considered more secure than using your credit card for online shoppers? As online merchants what security measures have been most effective for protecting shoppers identity? What are new implementations you are considering?
Since going over to Paypal as our main credit card gateway we have reduced fraudulent orders to zero, all though I am generally happy with their service I dislike the way they push the unregistered user into signing up with Paypal. I agree that the emerging payment processors like google checkout will create more problems of having to register your cc details with different companies exactly the opposite of why a service like Paypal was created.