Google Checkout will never beat PayPal

Unless they -really- get their act together. Point in case – I have ordered two Roombas plus accessories from iRobot, and my credit card has $1000 in a limbo between August 22nd and August 30th. I have no idea if the card charge will eventually go through, as it’s in what is called an authorized state. The money has not left my account, but the bank is holding the charge out of my balance in case the merchant (in this case Google Checkout) finally captures the payment.

The chain of events has been thus:

1. Ordered the robots on the iRobot store. Clicked the Google Checkout button.
2. Entered my payment information on Google Checkout. I’m using a virtual MasterCard, which you pre-charge with the amount you want to spend. It’s a disposable number, so no worries on it being stolen or miss-used.
3. I receive an email from iRobot saying my order has been received – all seems good.
4. Google Checkout now says that the payment has failed, so I add some more credit to the card, and tell Google to retry.
5. I receive an email from iRobot saying my order has been canceled, with no specific reason given.
6. Google Checkout informs me the payment has now been successful, and that the vendor has received my order. But, the vendor has already received….and canceled it!.

This all took place within two hours. After this, iRobot says my order was canceled, and no charges have been made (they don’t charge until they ship). Google Checkout, however, says the vendor has received the order, and my card WILL be charged. So far, my bank has only told me that the charge is in the authorization state, it has not been captured, and the limit date until an automatic rollback is done is August 30th.

What does all this have to do with PayPal? Basically, that Google Checkout, in its current state, will never beat PayPal. These are my main gripes:

• Google Checkout has no phone support. PayPal does. When there is a problem with my money, I want to talk to someone right now. I don’t want to send an email and wait – even if the reply is quick. Arguing over email is hard to impossible.
• Google Checkout has very feeble fraud protection. Last time I checked, they only used AVS, which is easy to fool if you have the card owner’s billing address. For example, Bibit uses a full-featured scoring system with some 60 different checks, which can be fine-tuned by the merchant. It costs a few cents per transaction, but it’s well worth the hassle.
• Google Checkout has its flows all ass-backwards. Why did they send my order to iRobot before they authorized the payment, only to then send a cancellation which triggered a cancellation on iRobot’s systems? The right way would be to only send iRobot the order after the payment has been authorized. Then, when iRobot ships, the payment can be captured.

There are plenty of comments, right from when Checkout was launched until today, about the system’s shortcomings. Google needs to get their act together, or risk losing merchants and customers.