Can I use Google’s shopping cart?

As we hurtle along at breakneck speed in the online world, the battle is well and truly on between Google and the new Yahoo and Microsoft merged entity. Both companies are trying to win the hearts and minds of users by offering more and more features to build and maintain user loyalty.

Just look at Google’s free Analytics, Website optimiser, Gmail products, etc.

In the US, Bing is luring users with cash-back offers on goods purchased through their associated merchants. Maybe ‘cold hard cash’-backs will win the search engine war! Maybe not.

Speaking of battles, Google is a long way behind with the one it’s having with PayPal, but has recently made a move to allow users to install a free shopping cart on their websites.

It’s pretty nifty, gives Google a bit of an edge and for most basic needs, it fits the bill.

The main problem is that unless you’re based in the US or UK, you can’t use it – yet. This is so frustrating! When it comes to so many of these ‘new’ features, countries like Australia are always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

You’d think Google would beta test their new features and products on ‘small’ markets like ours before rolling out to the big ones like the US and UK.

From memory, Google Checkout (Google’s answer to PayPal checkout) has been around since 2006, but Australian merchants still aren’t able to offer it as a payment option. Too slow Google.

For now, if you want to get a free shopping cart and integrated checkout, you’ll either need to use a third party shopping cart product and integrate with PayPal or indeed use PayPal’s own shopping cart solution, which isn’t quite as good as Google’s, though it does allow you to easily create a ‘buy now’, or ‘add to cart’ button which you can place beside products you offer for sale on your site.

It’s reasonably powerful; you can add a drop down next your products showing, for example, sizes of a product with associated prices.

The other thing we’ve noticed with (smaller, relatively unknown brand) merchants who use PayPal as a payment option is a noticeable lift in conversions. It’s a good idea to offer PayPal as a payment option alongside your credit card payment option during checkout. There’s a level of trust PayPal offers users in terms of buyer protection, etc.

To get started you’ll need to create a PayPal account (if you’re one of the few people who doesn’t already have one). The merchant fees per transaction are quite high (around 3.5% per transaction) – generally more expensive than Visa/MasterCard but about the same if you were to accept Amex as a payment option on your site.

So at this stage, Google shopping cart isn’t an option, you’ll need to go to a third party cart or give PayPal a try if you want to make it as easy as possible.

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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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