Google Checkout question

[dgray]

When you enable Google Checkout, customers are presented with a pre-shopping cart screen allowing them to select either the standard ShopSite checkout process, or Google Checkout.

This is too soon to force a decision on payment type by the customer. Why can't you add it as a checkout option in the shopping cart, next to the regular checkout button?

[Jim]

Because Google will not allow any checkout option to be displayed with or before their option. Strange business rule but that is their requirement.

[dgray]

Ok, thanks, I just read Google's policy and guidelines on integration. So the problem is that ShopSite has a drop down list of payments in the shopping cart screen. Why? Presumably this is purely to identify PayPal which needs to go to a different checkout screen. Can you not move the PayPal choice to the checkout screen and fork there if a customer selects it from the list? It does seem less than ideal to have the card choice in both the cart and the checkout screens. (Incidentally, why do you have the customer choose the card type anyway? I can't see why you need it but if you do it's completely determined by the first few digits.)

Or, how about removing the choice of cards from the shopping cart screen and instead have 3 buttons: regular, paypal and google. The google policy says don't present it as a card type like visa, mastercard, etc. because it's not a payment type but an alternative checkout flow. Well so is PayPal and there's no mention in the google policy about PayPal.