Mike Hyland

eBay To Test Universal Shopping Cart That Competes With Google

Amazing we both were early in our predictions. Mine came in 2004 as I investigated the common evils of the affiliate marketing industry that feeds traffic to these comparision sites fuels by merchnat product feeds and keyword click fees. The Safe Haven Sales network model called for eliminating commission diversion and sales reporting problems by using a common shopping cart for all participating merchants. www.ecomcity.com/safeh...

Google Checkout has it right by protecting the shopper from abusive gorilla marketing tactics of merchant middlemen, selling off their privacy info. The combo of consumer protections, easy common checkout process, low cost merchant gateway per sale fee, fraud protections, no phishing exploits, makes Google Checkout a winner if adopted by shoppers. You'd think Google's dominance in online advertising would budget promoting GC on shopping portals on a CPM or slotting fee basis.

Google Checkout Flexing Muscle

Interesting move by eBay/shopping.com/PayP... to try and head off Google Checkout's move to protect consumer privacy from Gorilla marketers like them. I'll assume they've all read my solution to the common ills of the affiliate advertising networks, and their pool of merchants... www.ecomcity.com/safeh... They sure know the PPCSE search term arbritage game regarding brand names when paying their monthly search partner bills to Google.

Capturing the shoppers privacy information at the point of sale always was the holy grail of direct marketers. Just ask the MetaRewards folks. An earlier article here on Shopping.com (Oct 6th) launching a single session multi-merchant shopping cart with PayPal checkout bastardizes my Safe Haven Sales network model with their hidden gottcha. True it launches them into a CPA revenue network model turning each merchant's product feed into both a PPCSE keyword fee and/or per sale commission source. Conflicts arise on both who owns the customer and who spins what happens to all the samll Shopping.com Dealtime.com affiliates driving traffic to those sites.

Needless to say the Google Checkout folks rather work on a model where the consumer doesn't become a victim of the Adwhores.