Google launches rival to PayPal and its called Checkout!

If you believe Reuters, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal plus a legion of other tech news sites and worthy blogs, Google will finally today launch their answer to PayPal and its not called GBuy or GoogleWallet, its gonna be called Google Checkout!

Google said Checkout stores names, shipping and credit card information and eliminates the need for consumers to resubmit that data with each purchase. Google is responsible for processing the credit card payments and keeping data safe. Sounds like PayPal to me!

"We think we're making e-commerce a lot more efficient and easier to use," Salar Kamangar, Google's vice president of product management, told Reuters.

Google charges merchants 2% of the value of each sale plus 20 cents per transaction - a fee that early users said was in line with other options. The company rewards its advertisers by offering them $10 in free sales processing for every dollar they spend on its advertising program, AdWords.

Google plan to link AdWords with Checkout and Google Analytics so that you can trace the success opf your ads all the way through clicks, to ordering and through to the purchase.

Google Checkout may do more for website marketing and tracking than for e-payments - or at least at the beginning. If I was Ebay I'd still be nervous.