Google’s ambitions to control ecommerce continue…

Google Checkout is now being pushed through Froogle. Shmuel, the Google Checkout know-it-all, has the details.
Here’s the post from the Google Checkout Blog.

The Google Checkout blog post refers people to the Bulk Upload Instructions in order to participate. Not much there to go on, but in my SingleFeed specs, I’ve been recommending that participating merchants list ‘Google Checkout’ as a payment method in the ‘payment_accepted’ field.

This integration is an obvious move we all knew was coming.

At this point, I count around 250 sites on the Google Checkout list (up from 180 on August 2). Nice percentage growth, but it’s obviously EARLY.

I still haven’t seen hard independent research that Google Checkout is increasing CTR or Conversion Rate. I still have concerns about customer ownership.

But I’m busy dealing with server issues - sorry. I’ll try to provide more analysis soon. If anyone has any specific questions, let me know.