Yes finally today one of the longest rumoured Google services had been released. And the good news: it isn’t even a beta, this is straight away a full product. I think this is probably something to do with the nature of the product. Google is a huge brand name, it is very trusted. But people may be a little skeptical about entering their credit card information into a beta service. So what is this thing? It is almost identical to PayPal. It allows you to pay for goods at a variety (and I imagine an ever increasing list) of stores using your Google Account login information. So you only have to fill out your credit card information once, and then you just need your Google Account login, and you can buy your stuff.

It also offers a few nice things like it claims that it will track the shipping of the products, although I personally would be hugely surprised if the shipping service they gave was accurate or up to date. I find whenever dealing with delivery the further you are from the original people who are posting it to you the more and more out of date the information gets. But we will see on that one. There is also an order history which I suppose is nice, and there is a way that you can review the people you have bought off.

The real killer for this service is, like so many of Google’s new services, its integration. Particularly this time with Google Search. If I can search for “Laptop” and have a product page with “Buy Now” buttons which use the checkout service that would be great. I can’t see this integrated into Froogle right now but that seems totally stupid so I imagine that it is, but just somehow subtly. The other key thing is how many companies take it up. I am not sure how this will work out. Google is becoming well known for good but unpopular products (I am not going to quote that Finance figure again), and this one looks good, so popular?