Google Checkout Alternative

As you may have heard, Google Checkout is shutting down on Nov. 20, 2013. That means there will be quite a few online businesses and nonprofits scrambling to find a Google Checkout alternative in a pretty short amount of time. While we’re not under the illusion that MoonClerk is a viable alternative for all use cases, we’d love to shed a little light on what Google Checkout does, where we might fit in, and in the cases where we don’t fit in, what the best solutions are.

Google Checkout is a fairly complex payment infrastructure that is a direct competitor to PayPal. Here are just a few of the services it provides along with alternatives to those services:

Google Checkout Alternatives for Ecommerce

Many third party ecommerce systems integrated with Google Checkout, allowing businesses the ability to accept payments through Google Checkout as either the sole payment processor or as one of multiple options. Through the ecommerce system, customers could add items to a cart and then checkout with Google Checkout, similar to how they would with PayPal. Google Checkout also offered its own proprietary ecommerce system, though it was limited. MoonClerk doesn’t currently offer a full e-commerce experience. If you’re looking for a Google Checkout alternative for great standalone ecommerce software, we recommend taking a look at either Shopify or SquareSpace. If you already have an e-commerce system and are just looking for the payments portion of your system, we suggest looking at Stripe.

Google Checkout Alternative for Recurring Payments

Google Checkout does offer recurring billing and recurring donations.  This is actually a strong suit for MoonClerk because recurring payments are our focus. We offer a great deal more functionality and flexibility than Google Checkout in this arena.

Google Checkout Alternatives for Invoicing

MoonClerk doesn’t currently offer invoices since our main focus is on recurring payments, which often eliminates the need to send invoices over and over. While many of our customers will send an invoice by email with a link to a MoonClerk payment form for their customers to click and pay, we don’t handle creating the actual invoice. There are some great companies like LessAccounting and Harvest that offer pretty robust invoicing systems.

Google Checkout Alternative for Buy Now Buttons

Google Checkout offered a service similar to PayPal with its Buy Now button. MoonClerk offers it’s own Buy Now button that you can use for one-time purchases/sales on your websites.

Google Checkout Alternative for Donations

One of our strong suits is helping nonprofits and churches accept donations on their site. We’ve put together a page that explains the benefits of using MoonClerk to accept donations online. We allow nonprofits to accept both recurring and one-time donations and we even have a Donate button you can use.

Image by Flickr User James Cridland