14 DAY TRIAL // Google Checkout hasn't been one of the prominent products that the Mountain View based company has ever given birth to and it's something of a baby attempt to take over the respective market, currently dominated without any shadow of a doubt by PayPal.
Their strategy was somewhere in between providing Checkout as the default service for online shopping and leaving it somewhere behind in the navigational bar, or at least that's my view on things. I've seen many attempts to bring it forward but not a sustained campaign. Not until now, that is. The dev team has probably sat down and had a long meeting with the PR department and the people from Marketing and decided that this is a situation similar to "if the Mountain doesn't come to Mohammed, Mohammed goes to the Mountain." Namely, if the product they offer is similar to PayPal, but the latter is winning the race, they should work directly with the users ,instead of going about it the way the engineers see it fit.
"When it comes to improvements for Checkout, you know best which features will make a difference to your business. In the past, we've followed your discussions in the developers forum and have noted your email requests too. Now we've built a Feature Request Form that will let you vote for the three new elements you'd be most interested in having. We've also included a section at the bottom where you can suggest any features we haven't listed. Your ideas will help us get a better idea of which new features you'd most like to see. So let us know what you want -- we're listening!" is what Lisa August-Schmidt posted on the Official Google Checkout Blog.
I hope that the features will be customizable for each and every user, much in the way the iGoogle homepage works.