Goog-Ali Goog-Ali Goo!

Google definitely has a lot up their sleeves as it continues to launch new services like Google Earth, Google Movies, etc., to the worldwide public. This time, its even gotten aggressive enough to challenge eBay's PayPal.com, and Alibaba's AliPay.com, in the highly sensitive, litigation-proned, yet extremely profitable online payment solutions market.

So what is Google getting itself into? Well look at eBay's PayPal.com that practically has a whole team of lawyers busy in courtrooms 365 days a year (ok, maybe except for weekends and public holidays, during which time they're probably back in their offices drafting up arguments for their cases). They face litigations in the hundreds of million of dollars each year due to money laundering, or defrauded customers, etc. But so what? PayPal.com can afford it! It does afterall charge a minimum of 1.9% on the $18.9 billion dollars that it processes on an annual basis. In fact, they earn so much in this seemingly inelastic market that they can't really be bothered with the quality of their service to its users either. They have an extremely slow and inefficient email-based response system, not to mention the non-existence of a 1-800 number (believe it or not, they actually require users to pay long-distance themselves everytime they need to contact their customer services).

Simply type PayPal on Google Search, and ranked top three comes their very own PayPal.com site, followed by more interestingly, PayPalWarning.com and PayPalSucks.com, an aggregate of sites bashing PayPal for their poor services. What's more scary is how it talks about PayPal confiscating money without reason or just cause. True or false, and just how bad could they possibly be? Well, I tried calling them myself, and indeed, the first thing I noticed was that there was no toll-free number. After waiting an additional 45+ minutes together with pressing numerous buttons on the dialing pad, I finally reached a rather "not-so-polite" support staff.   One thing was for sure from that experience (in addition to the large number of websites publishing bad user experiences), I definitely won't be a PayPal user in this lifetime. Surprisingly, China's Alibaba.com doesn't seem to experience so much negative publicity, but considering everything was in Chinese, it also scared me away.

But the question really is, would Google have a chance? Well, I wouldn't entirely doubt them. Their direction seems to be good, and customers actually mean something to them. As long as they can capture and continue to develop a loyal user-base (with better services and rates), why not? It just might be as successful as practically everything else Google has launched out to the market to date.

PayPal.com, AliPay.com and "All-New" GBuy.com

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