Chocolate Factory chucks out Checkout
Stick your stuff in our Wallet
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Google Checkout is the latest product to check into the Chocolate Factory's hospice, with merchants told it will be farewelled in six months.
Merchants using the service are being encouraged to switch to Google Wallet Instant Buy or find another payment processor – a move which involves a lot more disruption to the small business than merely replacing a RSS reader.
The seven-year-old Web-based payments system apparently hasn't met Mountain View's high standards of adoption – that is, it's failed to take over the world, leaving a trail of bleeding and broken competitors behind it. Amazon still exists, as does PayPal and a bunch of minor players. Two of these, Braintree and Shopify, have gleefully taken the opportunity to offer “switch to us” discounts to Google Checkout customers.
The Chocolate Factory is hoping that a Wallet Instant Buy API and Wallet Objects API will be enough to retain customers. In other words, it reckons both of its Checkout merchants will want to rewrite their payments processing to a Google API rather than finding someone who can give them a pay button.
That is, if current Checkout users don't wonder whether Wallet will take its own trip in the tumbril one day.
Google Play sellers using Checkout, the announcement says, will be moved automatically to Wallet Instant Pay. ®
