sounders

Google never had great customer service for this product. There were less than five people (customers often called this out since they would submit multiple help tickets and the same people would respond) and they never wanted to devote money to better customer service since the product wasn't maintained. Thus companies didn't want to adopt a below par product with bad customer service compounding the problem.

As a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).

Saying that Google Checkout is being replaced is extremely misleading to merchants. Almost all Google Checkout merchants process less than a million with Google Checkout, so it is not worth it for them to do their own credit card processing or if they are large enough, there isn't enough of a value prop to use the wallet API.

The Wallet API was announced back in November, but it seems never caught on. I remember that 1800 Flowers and Rockport were offering discounts to customers that used Buy with Wallet, but this doesn't seem very successful by the lack of top merchants that aren't adopting it (even when there is a financial incentive like when Google funded the discounts for Rockport and 1800 flowers). Yes all people that buy Android apps have a Google Wallet account, but they aren't using this account outside of the Android ecosystem.

The customer support for checkout just isn't there as well. It has always been via email and extremely slow. With Paypal if you do over 200k then you get a dedicated account manager and they always have phone support. It has always seemed like a product that they are trying to make solve a problem it isn't equipped to handle- like having Android developers setup a Google Checkout account in order to get paid. It isn't designed for developer needs but it works well enough to get by.

I think it's interesting that people with a computer science and technical background are often referred to as "engineers" in tech.

It seems like such a general label that can apply to anyone from a chemical engineer to a CS major, it all depends on the context.

The US has been extremely slow to adopt this technology despite, the adoption rates around the world. Visa and MasterCard have set a date of 2015 to push merchants to have their checkout terminals be EMV compliant or face higher fraud liability charges.

Who is your merchant provider?

I'm curious because I've heard similar rants about many products that process payments for merchants- Paypal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, etc.. I'm interested how your provider is able to circumvent all this red-tape that larger companies seem to have.

I'm confused by that statement in the video. From my experience bloggers don't have the same level of importance as investors and engineers do.

Can anyone explain how bloggers are so necessary that "none of it would work if there wasn't each part?"

I agree with you about linking Apple and Chinese. When I think of the Apple labor force I automatically think Foxconn, which leads to thoughts of labour camps and worker suicide, not that that's the whole picture of course.