A place in history and obscene profits to the first microISV who can clone the service provided by
Payloadz except using Google Checkout as the underlying payment processor instead of Paypal. I would gladly opt for Google Checkout over Paypal if customers could be convinced to use it, for one reason and one reason alone: its going to be 2% extra profit on every sale because of their tie-in with AdWords. The deal is that normally you pay 2% + 20 cents, but AdWords eats at your bill: for every $1 spent on AdWords you get to charge $10.00 free. I’d prefer if they just gave you AdWords credit for Google Checkout transactions but, hey, its a living.
Seperately, I’ve been investigating the possibility of doing away with Payloadz in my current setup, which is easy since I don’t have any actual customers at the moment. The question is: does saving perhaps $15 a month justify the amount of effort it will take me to hack together some Perl scripts to do exactly the same thing Payloadz does? Answer: No. The next question: is the hacking justified by it letting me get around stupid limitations in the Payloadz UI, like being unable to redirect my customers to my site after the order has completed? Answer: Quite possibly. I think I’ll keep my account around just for the additional exposure on Google, though.
*sigh* I think if this ever becomes successful it will be as much because I successfully adapted to The Big G as because I have a quality piece of software.
