Hi everyone. I've been working on this at Google for a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. If you don't want to ask here, feel free to email me at <my username> AT google.com. There might be a delay in responding if I get a lot of messages or if you have a particularly challenging question.
My question is: when you send emails like "it has come to our attention... fraudulent activity..." [1] [2] and confiscate $30,000+ earnings by shutting down long-standing AdSense accounts, will you do the same to the entire Gmail accounts, or just to the money transferring functionality?
One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.
Let's say I use this to pay for something I've purchased online, and I later realize the seller is a scammer and want to issue a chargeback. Will that be possible? What are your plans for this situation?
If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?
I had a prepard card setup with Google Wallet when it first came out. Then that card was discontinued by Google. I had $100 loaded onto that card. When I asked Google for a refund (September of 2012), first the form to submit a refund request wasn't working, then I couldn't get a hold of a human to talk to. After doing some googling (maybe 1-2 hours), I found the phone number to call customer service. When I got to talk to a person, they were unaware of the Prepaid card being discontinued. Because of this, they were also unable to give me a refund. Then I called again, seemed like the same person picked up, and I told again to fill in the online request form. Somehow, the second time, the form did work. But it's been way over the allotted time to receive my refund from Prepaid refund, how does Google expect to send money and actually get my rent, deposit, gift, or anything I use Paypal for to not be held up on their servers somewhere?
Is there any chance of getting your Gmail account shut down because of suspicious transactions etc with wallet? I understand that with a service like wallet Google will need to shut down accounts that look like they might be fraudulent (even though often it might turn out not to be) but it would be good to have a guarantee that they won't take the Gmail account down with it.
I want to make use of this sooner rather than later. Is the rollout completely random or determined by some other meaningful factor. Lets say I connect my bank account with Google Wallet now, would that put me in line above someone without a bank account associated with their Google Wallet?
This looks awesome, but not at all core to Google's core revenue generators (gmail isn't, either, and this is on top of gmail...). Not to be a dick, but how do we know we can trust adopting this? For user to user payments it's not a big deal to switch to/from this, but for anything else, ...
Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, transactions delayed, etc. when money is involved. Google historically doesn't have a good track record for "hand holding customer service".
Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded.
If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale:
- The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps.
- Manual spam detection in search results
- Customer Support for most adwords accounts
- Customer Support for Nexus devices
I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win.
I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.
They've already started to bite the bullet and provide real customer service with Google Fiber. We could be witnessing a huge change in their institutional attitude toward customer service.
The amount they pay for bug bounties has just become worthless. The value of an XSS or even CSRF bug in Google products has just shot through the roof.
I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.
The exact same thing could be said about Google Apps, or PayPal - near-total absence of customer service didn't stop adoption of either of those.
(To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)
When there's a substantial amount of money involved Google has great customer service. Never had a problem getting issues resolved with my Adwords account.
They already have enough relationships with governments around the world for all of their data centers and other projects (maps, mail, youtube, etc.) that I think they could do a decent job on this. I expect it'll still be several years before it's a decent competitor to paypal but it'll be nice to finally get some competition in that space (low overhead global payments without a merchant account).
I suspect that this year Apple will soon release hardware and software that will leverage all those iTunes credentials to provide something similar.
However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :)
The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!
How is this going to be handled, as a money exchange system ("yo, here's for covering lunch for me yesterday"), or like a payment system ("send your payment to [email protected]")?
It seems presented as the former:
> you can securely send money to friends and family in the U.S. - without leaving your Gmail inbox
but people will assuredly try to use it as the latter. When that happens, how will Google address fraud claims?
Edit: Specifically, I mean, how will they investigate fraud claims? Will all transactions be final (easiest), or will they try to refund people who make mistakes (harder)? And what happens when a GMail account gets hacked?
Ok, so it's 2.9% fee for credit / debit card payments. And I'm assuming the "connect directly to your bank account" is just using ACH transfers, which take a couple days.
Anyways, a while ago I heard a rumor that they had a team working on adding some, um... alternative, payment methods. Does anyone know where Google Wallet is headed with this?
Edit And here's some clues from the ToS[1]:
> 6. Google Wallet Balance & Peer to Peer Payments
> 6.1 The P2P Service is currently available only to Senders and Recipients who are U.S. residents and who otherwise meet the requirements of these Terms of Service. The P2P Service may not be used for business, commercial or charitable transactions.
> 6.2.a.iii For a Funding Account that is an ACH-enabled checking or savings account, initiate a debit through the ACH Network in the P2P Payment amount.
> 6.6 GPC may charge fees in accordance with the then-current fee schedule, as stated herein. Google Wallet may assess a fee of 2.9%, with a minimum fee of $0.30, per P2P Payment charged to the Sender for P2P Payments processed through the Service. Such fee shall be waived where your Google Wallet Balance is used for the P2P Payment, or an ACH-enabled checking or savings account is the Funding Account for the P2P Payment.
Looks like they've beat out Dwolla here. Ouch.
I'm also really interested in what forbidding "charitable transactions" actually entails. Is it just donations to 501(c)(3)s or is it gifts of other types? How about political donations? And what's its primary purpose? My first thought was that it must be for tax reasons, but then I remembered that people who want to prevent PayPal charge backs often request that payments be marked as "gifts", so it can't be disputed.
It's unclear what happens to your Google Wallet balance if your account is closed:
2.4 Relation to your Google Account
In order to use Google Wallet Services, you must have a Google Account which is in good standing with Google, in accordance with the Google Terms of Service. If you or Google closes your Google Account for any reason, your Google Wallet Account will also be closed and you will no longer be able to access the Google Wallet Services.
What's not clear is how a person without a google wallet account claims the money. Is it the same tedious process of having to verify a bank account, give a social security number, promise a first born child, etc.
It should be noted that much of this process is federally mandated across a multitude of regulations. Since 9/11, it has been illegal to open bank accounts without a valid SSN, so that the government can track money more easily.
Awesome video. The music got me kind of perked up for the day. It almost made me forget that nobody uses Google Wallet. We've run an ecommerce store with a decent amount of throughput for about 5 years now and I think we had 1 person try and pay with Google Wallet (and she was a Google employee and friend at the time).
I'm probably off on the whole thing here, because the examples in the vid show it as sort of a way to make good with your pals and not so much for ecommerce, but being an old timer, I sort of like to leave my money transfers to people that specialize in it and not as an add-on to my email client.
Interesting move on Google's part. Clearly the payments space is a getting a lot of investment from both big and small players each with their own take on it.
It is also the first time that it felt like Google was stepping where it might not belong. And its a weird thing since I believe anyone should be able to do anything and let the market decide. For some reason this gave me the same vibe I used to get when a Microsoft would announce they were going to enter some hot new market in order to chill any investment/work in that market. I don't think that is their plan, but perhaps its a happy side effect they get?
I'd much rather see Google create an actual bank and then integrate with that banks services than do it this way.
How quickly can I get money out of google wallet? this url: http://www.google.com/wallet/how-it-works/in-store.html doesn't really render properly in chrome. I guess I can spend the money pretty easily once it is in my wallet.
You said to ask you any questions, so far you only answered one single question for the last hour. Why would you say ask me anything and don't respond to the questions?
Hmm, if they were devious they could use this to get people to sign up for G+ and by allowing micropayments to G+ accounts (they can be sent from anywhere).
In case there was any ambiguity about whether Google knew the 'real you' from their logging of IPs and search terms, this should remove all of it.
In a way I think we're seeing Google striking against Facebook in what I call the "identity wars" where each service is struggling to be an identity and information service about people.
PayPal is global, for one, and they have reputable foundation. They have brand recognition too. You and me know about Stripe/Google Wallet/Amazon Payments/Dwolla/etc. but does John Doe from Craigslist/Ebay/"Mom & Pop shop" know about them?
> Google properties such as Google Play, Google Drive, YouTube etc. are not covered under the Google Wallet Purchase Protection. Please reach out to those products directly through their help centers.
[+] [-] jrockway|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adsenseclient|13 years ago|reply
One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585043
[+] [-] michaelt|13 years ago|reply
If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?
[+] [-] numbers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cowen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chintan|13 years ago|reply
If you allow any email, then what about man-in-middle attack as the email might go over SMTP/plain text?
[+] [-] almost|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lectrick|13 years ago|reply
/obligatory
[+] [-] t0|13 years ago|reply
>This feature will be rolling out to Gmail users ages 18+ in the U.S. over the next few months
[+] [-] bpd1069|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lingben|13 years ago|reply
thanks!
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, transactions delayed, etc. when money is involved. Google historically doesn't have a good track record for "hand holding customer service".
[+] [-] sixothree|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcampbell1|13 years ago|reply
If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale:
- The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps.
- Manual spam detection in search results
- Customer Support for most adwords accounts
- Customer Support for Nexus devices
I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win.
I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.
[+] [-] wtallis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joosters|13 years ago|reply
Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.
[+] [-] _b8r0|13 years ago|reply
I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.
[+] [-] sneak|13 years ago|reply
(To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)
[+] [-] tcdent|13 years ago|reply
"... our customer service team will help resolve any questions you might have."
[+] [-] JimWillTri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plusbryan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|13 years ago|reply
On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet.
New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blantonl|13 years ago|reply
However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :)
The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!
[+] [-] tar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B-Con|13 years ago|reply
It seems presented as the former:
> you can securely send money to friends and family in the U.S. - without leaving your Gmail inbox
but people will assuredly try to use it as the latter. When that happens, how will Google address fraud claims?
Edit: Specifically, I mean, how will they investigate fraud claims? Will all transactions be final (easiest), or will they try to refund people who make mistakes (harder)? And what happens when a GMail account gets hacked?
[+] [-] clarkm|13 years ago|reply
Anyways, a while ago I heard a rumor that they had a team working on adding some, um... alternative, payment methods. Does anyone know where Google Wallet is headed with this?
Edit And here's some clues from the ToS[1]:
> 6. Google Wallet Balance & Peer to Peer Payments
> 6.1 The P2P Service is currently available only to Senders and Recipients who are U.S. residents and who otherwise meet the requirements of these Terms of Service. The P2P Service may not be used for business, commercial or charitable transactions.
> 6.2.a.iii For a Funding Account that is an ACH-enabled checking or savings account, initiate a debit through the ACH Network in the P2P Payment amount.
> 6.6 GPC may charge fees in accordance with the then-current fee schedule, as stated herein. Google Wallet may assess a fee of 2.9%, with a minimum fee of $0.30, per P2P Payment charged to the Sender for P2P Payments processed through the Service. Such fee shall be waived where your Google Wallet Balance is used for the P2P Payment, or an ACH-enabled checking or savings account is the Funding Account for the P2P Payment.
Looks like they've beat out Dwolla here. Ouch.
I'm also really interested in what forbidding "charitable transactions" actually entails. Is it just donations to 501(c)(3)s or is it gifts of other types? How about political donations? And what's its primary purpose? My first thought was that it must be for tax reasons, but then I remembered that people who want to prevent PayPal charge backs often request that payments be marked as "gifts", so it can't be disputed.
[1] https://wallet.google.com/legaldocument?family=0.buyertos...
[+] [-] axus|13 years ago|reply
2.4 Relation to your Google Account
In order to use Google Wallet Services, you must have a Google Account which is in good standing with Google, in accordance with the Google Terms of Service. If you or Google closes your Google Account for any reason, your Google Wallet Account will also be closed and you will no longer be able to access the Google Wallet Services.
[+] [-] luke_s|13 years ago|reply
Not all of the worlds 7 billion people live in the united states you know ...
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|13 years ago|reply
AFAIK, IANAL, IIRC, etc etc etc etc
[+] [-] dragonwriter|13 years ago|reply
They set up a Google Wallet. See Sec. 6.3(f) of the ToS [1].
[1] https://wallet.google.com/legaldocument?family=0.buyertos...
[+] [-] gesman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinhboy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ereckers|13 years ago|reply
I'm probably off on the whole thing here, because the examples in the vid show it as sort of a way to make good with your pals and not so much for ecommerce, but being an old timer, I sort of like to leave my money transfers to people that specialize in it and not as an add-on to my email client.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
It is also the first time that it felt like Google was stepping where it might not belong. And its a weird thing since I believe anyone should be able to do anything and let the market decide. For some reason this gave me the same vibe I used to get when a Microsoft would announce they were going to enter some hot new market in order to chill any investment/work in that market. I don't think that is their plan, but perhaps its a happy side effect they get?
I'd much rather see Google create an actual bank and then integrate with that banks services than do it this way.
[+] [-] jpdoctor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzz|13 years ago|reply
You said to ask you any questions, so far you only answered one single question for the last hour. Why would you say ask me anything and don't respond to the questions?
[+] [-] decauth|13 years ago|reply
This would definitely make classic social-engineering tricks like Nigerian scams easier to pull off.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/latest-facebook-scam-phishe...
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
People will just through hoops to receive money.
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|13 years ago|reply
In a way I think we're seeing Google striking against Facebook in what I call the "identity wars" where each service is struggling to be an identity and information service about people.
[+] [-] espeed|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziko|13 years ago|reply
It's a massive market. Google has hit a jackpot there. I salute then.
[+] [-] JoeKM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoyWizard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ernestipark|13 years ago|reply
Also note you need to verify your identity before you hook up your bank acct.
[+] [-] prsutherland|13 years ago|reply
> Google properties such as Google Play, Google Drive, YouTube etc. are not covered under the Google Wallet Purchase Protection. Please reach out to those products directly through their help centers.
Is gmail lumped under the "etc." above?