In a recent story on Bloomberg.com, it was reported that less than one out of every five users of Google Checkout is happy with the payment service. That sounds about right. PayPal has been dominating the online payment processing and transacting markets ever since it was first introduced to the internet in the late 90’s. Google may be Google, but, contrary to the popular belief not everything that Google makes is gold. Google Checkout is a perfect example of this. The service, while simple in many ways, is just too different from the payment giant PayPal for consumers to be able to make the jump effectively. It’s not like switching from Mastercard to Visa.

Another service that Google tried to start up was “Froogle”. Froogle was in a nutshell a Half.com clone. When it comes to the saying “If you can’t beat em, join em” Google has a different approach. “If you can’t beat em, pour money down the drain and refuse to admit that what you are doing is not working.” I can’t say that that theory is wrong all the time though. After all, Google did manage to turn YouTube into the 4th most popular website on the internet overall. When Google bought YouTube everybody was saying it was the worst thing they could do, due to all of the legal trouble YouTube was in. That’s not even taking into account the fact that YouTube was operating at a major loss at the time. Either way, as the #4 visited site on the internet, I doubt you will find many people with legitimate reasons to bash the YouTube business plan.

Back on the Google / eBay subject though. At one point in the future I could definitely see Google buying eBay if Microsoft doesn’t do it first. I think both Microsoft and Google are both probably facing antitrust and monopoly issues with such a purchase, but, if one of the two can find a successful workaround it’s going to be one bad day for the other. eBay is the 19th most popular website on the web. Not only have they never been successfully duplicated, but, they haven’t even seen any competition on the horizon. New auction websites sprout every day, but, there’s something about the name “eBay” that keeps drawing people in for more.