Author Archive

In the spirit of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we'd like to take a moment to provide some tips for keeping your financial information secure across the web.

At Google Checkout, the confidentiality of the personal information stored within your account, including your credit card and bank account numbers, is our highest priority. This information is stored on our servers with extensive safeguards in place, and we won't share it with anyone except under the limited circumstances described in our Privacy Policy.

In addition, here are a few tips to help keep your information safe as you browse the web and conduct business online:

• When shopping online, investigate the seller before you buy. A legitimate business or individual seller should give you a physical address and a working telephone number at which they can be contacted in case you have problems.
• Check for a secure (https) connection when transmitting any sensitive information such as credit card numbers.
• Don't reuse passwords across multiple accounts, and make sure your passwords are strong.
• Always navigate to your online banking account directly (by entering the URL in your browser or using a bookmark), not by clicking on links in emails.
• Whenever possible, avoid logging in to your online banking account or entering any other sensitive information onto websites while using a public computer.
• Always log out completely after using online accounts, and never save your passwords on public computers.
• Beware of money scams.

Although National Cyber Security Awareness Month only comes around in October, remember to visit the Google Checkout Security Center for valuable cyber security information year-round.

Posted by Jessica Smallman, Checkout Risk Operations

We're pleased to announce a new feature that will allow Google Checkout merchants based in the U.S. to create and to run their own Checkout promotions at any time.

Starting today, you can sign in to your Checkout merchant account, go to the 'Tools' tab, and click the 'Promotions' link to create a Checkout promotion in less than a minute. You'll be able to specify the date and time you'd like the promotion to run, as well as choose from a variety of dollar-off discounts to offer your buyers.

Whenever you run a Google Checkout promotion, the standard Checkout button on your website will be automatically updated to display the discount amount and cart minimum. Additionally, for AdWords advertisers, we'll change the standard Checkout badge appearing on your AdWords ads to a Checkout badge that includes the discount amount as shown below. These promotional badges have been introduced to enable shoppers who search on Google.com to easily identify and take advantage of promotional offers.


Checkout promotions are a great way to attract new buyers, and we're excited to make this functionality more widely available. Please visit our Help Center for detailed instructions on setting up your own Checkout promotion. Thanks for using Google Checkout!

Posted by Gina Del Vecchio, Google Checkout Specialist

We recently launched a new, improved Google Checkout acceptance logo. When you display the new logo, shoppers can now not only see that you accept Google Checkout as a payment method, but they can also read reviews from Checkout buyers who have completed a purchase at your online store.

Want to highlight your reviews? When shoppers click on the acceptance logo, a new window opens to display your Checkout reviews page. This page lets shoppers learn more about the kind of experience to expect from your store by showing your average rating and previous buyers' comments. The page also includes links that allow shoppers to easily find reviews about customer service, shipping refunds, and returns. In the case where you have responded to a buyer's review, your response will be displayed below the review to provide any necessary clarification.

Adding the new acceptance logo to your website is easy. Simply copy and paste the code snippet located in your Google Checkout merchant account into your website's HTML. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Posted by George Reis, Software Engineer and Heather Folsom, Business Product Manager

Posted by Anita Barci, Product Marketing Manager

Posted by Mike Giardina, Google Checkout Strategist

Over the past couple of years, Google Checkout for Non-Profits has made donation processing simpler and more convenient for thousands of non-profits, processing tens of millions of dollars in donations per year.

Now we’ll be extending free donation processing for another year, until January 1, 2011, for those non-profits who are also members of our Google Grants program. All other non-profits will continue to process donations according to Checkout's standard fee structure.

If your organization is already a Google Grants recipient using Checkout to process donations, please make sure you have linked your Grants account with Checkout. If you’re not a Google Grants recipient and you meet the guidelines for the program, we strongly encourage you to apply.

In addition, we thought we’d share some data we collected about the default donation amount on one of our disaster relief donation drives on Google.com. We discussed internally whether the default donation amount should be left blank, made as high as $100 to increase the total amount collected, kept at $20 because people in the U.S. are accustomed to getting $20 bills from ATMs, or increased to $50 because it's close to the national giving average. In typical Google style we ran a few A/B experiments, randomly showing users different suggested donation amounts, in order to determine which amount would result in the greatest number of donations (or transactions) and total amount of donations collected.

First we compared leaving the donation amount blank, suggesting a $20 donation, and suggesting $100. We quickly saw that $20 was sub-optimal, resulting in fewer transactions and a lower total amount collected.