14 DAY TRIAL // PayPal, the world's most popular online payment and peer-to-peer transaction pack of services, has had enough time in the last seven years to conquer and dominate the online sales payment system, holding now about 24% of the US market. And this could have gone on and on forever, especially since eBay put their hands on the business back in 2002, strengthening the power and popularity if not almost establishing a monopoly in this field.
But the Google guys want it all or nothing, so it's time for PayPal to be afraid. One more Google thing, GBuy, is said to be just around the corner, as Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt confirmed in press accounts that the company was indeed building a payment service, according to the Wall Street Journal.
However Mr. Schmidt also said Gbuy won't offer a "person-to-person, stored-value payments system", in other words, PayPal is safe.
Well, this is hard to believe; Google is well-known for its determination, so they most certainly won't settle for less than everything they can get their 'services on' in every field. So, this is even harder to believe for Jeff Jordan, president of eBay Inc.'s PayPal online-payments unit, who is said to have picked up the phone on the red line since last year's May, asking his employees to dig out information about the Google service. Soon, they were monitoring blogs, news reports and even regular PayPal calls to customers who were eager to gossip about how Google had reached out to them.
And they have found out that, basically, for the last nine months, Google has recruited online retailers to test GBuy according to the above mentioned publication. The service will feature an icon posted alongside the paid-search ads of merchants, which the company hopes will tempt consumers to click on the ads, also letting consumers store their credit-card information on Google.
Bottom line, Gbuy, aside from being PayPal's worst nightmare at this time, is beyond any doubt a reality. And why shouldn't it be? It was only the logical step: the search engine has Gmail, Gtalk, a remarkably solid ad system, enjoys great popularity among domestic users, companies and product manufacturers alike. The newest "G" from Google, standing for Gbuy, makes a lot of sense in this picture.