Creating buttons using Google checkout
July 23rd, 2008 Posted in Building my websitesPressing the right buttons
When I was working on my brother’s ‘Buy now’ buttons for bestisotonic.com he was initially keen to add Worldpay as one of the payment options on the site.
I signed up for a Worldpay account a long time ago, but never actually got around to doing anything with it.
I took one look at my brother’s Worldpay acount and ran a mile.
Talk about a complicated interface!
I reckon I’m reasonably adept at this online lark, but Worldpay totally confused me.
So I suggested trying Google Checkout instead, which I’ve used as a customer but not yet used on my own websites. You know how it is, so much to do, so little time.
You may remember the big row when Google Checkout launched …
BBC News: Google unveils UK payments system
The Guardian: ebay bans Google Checkout
The Register: Google cancels anti-ebay bash
My brother’s decided to stick with Paypal buttons only on his bestisotonic.com website but I thought that for the sake of my own learning, I’d delve a little deeper into my own Google Checkout account and find out how easy their payment buttons are to use.
Inside the checkout
The first thing I found is that if you already hold a Google Checkout buyer’s account, you have to ‘upgrade’ this to enable you to add buttons to websites.
It was a very simple process which involved linking Google to a bank account.
They deposited a small amount into my business account, I in turn had to record what that amount was to confirm that I am the owner of that bank account.
It’s a standard online process, and I reckon it took 5 days for the small Google deposit to show up in my bank account.
So ‘hint one’ is, don’t expect to be able to get buttons on your website on day one, it takes a little time to validate accounts before you can use the system.
Once you’re in, the interface is simple enough to use.
Your options are:
- Send an invoice through email
- Use a pre-integrated cart
- Buy Now buttons
- Integrate yourself using the API (advanced!)
For the sake of this post, I’m going to look only at using ‘Buy now’ buttons as I did in my previous look at Paypal buttons.
The practical bit
Interestingly, with Google Checkout, the options for customisation are extremely limited.
I’m amazed that bearing in mind this service has had over a year to bed in now, they haven’t done more with it.
You pretty well have only one button option - ‘Buy Now’ - no ‘Donate’ or ‘Pay Now’ like you get with Paypal.
The ‘Buttons with options’ is a nice touch, in which you can create a dropdown menu for,say, T-shirt sizes.
Otherwise you simply have to complete ‘Item name’, ‘Item description’ and ‘Price and you’re done.
So in this example, I’m wanting to create a simple ‘Donate’ button as I did on my Paypal buttons page.
I don’t have ‘Donate now’ as an option, so this is the best I could do in Google - I even had to set a donation level, rather than leaving it up to the individual, which is a) a bit cheeky b) too limited:
