We recently launched an in house venture and decided to use Paypal and Google Checkout for the payment gateway options. Having integrated with other gateways previously we thought…HOW HARD CAN IT BE??
Well the Paypal api for direct payments was a bit of a mare but thats for a different post, and to be fair Google Checkout was pretty straight forward. The trouble started after we where up and running and had processed our first transactions. Bear in mind at this point that we have been using Google Adwords for several years now and have linked our Google Checkout Merchant account to our Adwords account to take advantage of the commission free transaction handling.
The first time we were aware of having fallen foul of Google was when a customer contacted us to show a message which was appearing on screen.
It has come to our attention that your Google Checkout merchant account does not comply with our Terms of Service. As a result your account has been closed and will not be reactivated. For all future orders, please use an alternate payment method Of course the extra bit of feedback at the end which google ask for is priceless and serves to simply make blood boil. I refer to of course the question..Was this information helpful? Yes/No I’ll leave the answer to you
So we emailed google……
Hi Google,
Our google checkout merchant account has been suspended and we dont understand why. It states we have not conformed to the terms of service but we dont understand which terms of service we have broken. Can you please give us some advise as this is very problematic for us haveing put lots of time and development into integration etc etc.
and Google replied……
Hello Packnet,
Thank you for your email. I understand that you would like to have your
xxxxx@xxxxxx account reinstated. Your account has been escalated to our specialists and reviewed again for Terms of Service violations. As a result of this review, your account will remain closed. Any pending and future transactions made with this account will not be processed. For security reasons, I am unable to provide details regarding this issue.Thank you for your understanding. For general product or account questions, please review our Help Centre at
http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/?hl=en-GB.
Alternatively, please do not hesitate to contact me by replying to this email.
Kind regards,
The Google Checkout Team
and we replied to Google…..
Hi Google,
We must say that this is an entirely unhelpful answer.
We have been Adwords customers since xxxx with one of our businesses and since xxxx with another business. We have spent in excess of xxxxx GBP with google over this period and now we cant get a straight answer to a simple question.This is completely out of order.
We have spent two months integrating our systems to use google checkout
and now its all for nothing and we have no answer as to why.
What are the terms of service violations? The product we are selling
doesn’t fall foul of your terms and the way we sell via the site doesnt
so can you please be more helpful, as this is costing us real money, and
we would prefer not to use PAYPAL for everything as we have a good
relationship with google…or so we believed.
We need more help!!
Regards
and google replied back to us….
Hello Packnet,
Thank you for your email. I understand that you’re concerned about your account status. The Google Checkout Team created our Terms of Service with the best interest of both buyers and sellers in mind. Please note, Google Checkout regularly reviews merchant account for the protection of Checkout buyers. I have reviewed your account again for Terms of Service violations. As a result of this review, your account will remain closed. I recommend utilizing an alternative payment method for future orders. I appreciate your understanding.
Kind regards,
The Google Checkout Team
So in short Google doesnt love us anymore and we have no idea as to why. We can guess at reasons but having now memorised the google checkout merchant account terms of service we can find no good reason why Google doesnt want to work with us. We have read of similar instances and spoken to others who have had the same problem. One thing is common to all and that is the totally unhelpful correspondence from the google checkout team. No information and no help is not the way to move forward especially if you want to compete with Paypal. We may not be the business which makes google worth an extra billion dollars but we do expect decent customer service. So google has lost love for us and quite frankly we have lost the love for her and are left to reflect on what might have been……..
If you have had similar issues with google then let us know about them by adding to this post.
