Google has quietly launched their Checkout product, that simply allows you to make payments at participating merchants.
Google Checkout: no PayPal killer
For the vendor, Google takes a smaller cut of payments than eBay’s PayPal does. PayPal starts at US$0.30 plus 2.9 percent of the total payment, but Google lowballs that with $0.20 and 2 percent, respectively. In addition, merchants that use AdWords get a break on these fees to the tune of ten times the amount spent on advertising. In other words, spend $100 on AdWords campaigns and get up to $1,000 of your Checkout fees refunded, making the service essentially free for some sellers.
Starbucks, and buy.com are in, but expect more to come quickly.
If that wasn’t enough incentive for businesses to open a Checkout account, there’s one more perk: if you’re a registered Checkout merchant, your AdWords text ads will get a spiffy little shopping cart icon next to them, which makes your ads stand out a bit from cart-less competition. Of course, if this becomes common practice, it will work the other way around as most ads have little carts and the ones that don’t might attract more eyeballs.
But even then, the non-carted ads will be missing a badge of honor, or so Google hopes. When you can entrust your credit card information to Google—and who doesn’t trust Google?—with clearly defined refund policies and dispute resolution procedures, why would you want to use a payment system cobbled together in some dodgy e-tailer’s garage and hand over credit card information to companies you never heard of before clicking on a Google ad?
I am not sure why this writer is hung up on the paypal comparison. The simple beauty of this service is that it simply facilitates payment. Consumers are ambivalent. Its all about the merchants and their choice to go with Google versus one of the payment acquirers.
The pricing is not predatory by any measure, and I am more curious if Google will choose to forsake revenue to achieve market share to build the accompanying sales data to add to their data sets, and further enhance their search.
Bankwatch 
I checked out “Google-checkout”.
The overall process seems to be very easy but exactly that makes this solution very vulnerable. During checkout there was no security question to make sure that I’m indeed the owner of the Google account or the associated Credit Cards in that account. Of course I used my username and password but because there are so many Google sites, using the same username and password, it is very easy to loose your login information on a hijacking page as you might not check the url for Ad-Words or Gmail every time you log on as those services never had the possibility to shop with your Credit Card.
Now because you have one account and login information for all it is quite possible that hackers will try to get your login information from any Google service out there! Even worth is the fact that the hacker can change the password without any problem. The owner of the account might not even get any information about the password change as the e-mail is sent to the according and hijacked Gmail account.
Because of this HUGE security risk I would not recommend using Google checkout!
Please checkout the http: // www dot thebilliondollarpatent dot com as s-registration solution that Google should have implemented in their service to make it solid and secure. This solution is requiring a third credential called TAN to make sure that ONLY the owner of that account is able to shop online even in case the account is hijacked.
I hope that everybody is aware of the security issue with Google checkout and will inform Google of a better solution!
Thanks and be safe;-)))!!