A Consuming Experience

Various Google blogs have mentioned that an offer to allow sellers to use Google Checkout (Google's online payments system) for free from 8 Nov to 31 Dec 2006.

Theoretically they even allow sellers to accept donations via Google Checkout (e.g. with a button), which might be good for bloggers who are thinking of accepting donations or having a tipjar. However, they only support sellers with US bank accounts at the moment (and indeed a US address, judging by their sign up page).

So if you're thinking of signing up for Checkout as a seller, e.g. to accept donations for your blog, too bad unless you're in the U.S. But if you do try it, let me know how it goes. (Here's the help pages for sellers).

For donations for bloggers, if you're not in the USA you're stuck with Paypal at the moment, though I don't like it for various reasons (not least because it seems virtually impossible to accept donations via Paypal anonymously to the donor, and their support people are hopeless), so I refuse to use it. (Yes that means I barely Ebay too, dinosaur that I am. But at least I own a mobile phone...).

Hurry up and extend Checkout to the UK, please Google!

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