Not having the chance to try Google Checkout as a Canadian merchant (it wasn't available to Canadian merchants at the time we made our payment solution decision), I'm reminded of a very early quote from Max Levchin when he discusses one of the first years after Paypal launched.
The quote attributed almost the entire first year of Paypal to fraud. Running and managing 3 CPA campaigns I can now understand why, it seems like everyone with a (stolen) credit card tries to extract the money through online scams.
It should have been clearly visible at the time that choosing Google Checkout would have been a risky decision as a merchant because Google was going to inevitably go through some of the same growing pains. Luckily for us, we dodged that bullet - but by no means is payment integration and fraud detection easy.
At the risk of being a shameless karma whore, let me note that Levchin's interview in Founders At Work is great and includes a lot of discussion of this issue. Here's a quote that leaps out at me today:
LEVCHIN: It's one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision, because, in the end, it's people's money. You don't really want some computer saying "$2.00 for you, nothing for you." You need a human with a brain to say, "Hmm. This looks like fraud, but I really don't think it is."
The quote attributed almost the entire first year of Paypal to fraud. Running and managing 3 CPA campaigns I can now understand why, it seems like everyone with a (stolen) credit card tries to extract the money through online scams.
It should have been clearly visible at the time that choosing Google Checkout would have been a risky decision as a merchant because Google was going to inevitably go through some of the same growing pains. Luckily for us, we dodged that bullet - but by no means is payment integration and fraud detection easy.