Google Checkout Payment Problems on Ecommerce Sites
Any customers that use Google Checkout as a payment method on their ecommerce website should keep an eye on the service to make sure it is functioning as usual. Reports from online forums and Twitter users have mentioned that when a customer clicks to pay with Google Checkout, Google’s service is showing as offline. Apparently this is mainly affecting the UK Google Checkout service, however US users also seem to be having some problems.
I just ran a test and can’t personally see any problems with the service, suggesting that any problems have now been fixed. I’ll keep an eye on the problem and in the meantime I would make sure you have multiple payment methods set up on any of your websites just in case.
Written by Chris Pangburn.
The problem was not at the customer end but affecting the merchant’s CMS, no merchant was able to check orders, payments or ship for the last 2 days. “A recent server update has temporarily disabled the Google Checkout merchant frontend servers.”. Google were silent and unresponsive in the main and many sellers switched to PayPal temporarily or permanently despite the higher fees. This has happened before.
Thanks for the information – I can’t believe a company as big as Google can make mistakes like that! What with Google also preventing merchants from accepting Maestro payments – seems like they have been taking ten steps backwards recently.
Having downtime of two days combined with an unresponsive customer service approach certainly raises questions about either a) their committment to the product and customers or b) their competence. I would be wanting to make certain I had a backup / alternative payment provider that I could switch to should anything crop up like this again in the future.
Thanks for the information, Even though we hav’nt encounter an issue with google checkout, Now I’ll keep a good a eye on it from now on.