NOVEDGE blog

Is Google Fair?

Let’s start with the facts.

A few days ago I was working at the data feed for a Google service called Google Base, previously known as Froogle. It’s an online service that allows sellers to upload a list of products with price and description and lets users search online for products to compare prices, shipping fees, and seller ratings.

for Google Base, PayPal is not a syntactically valid option

The new Google Base accepts a feed in a few different formats. One of the most flexible formats available is RSS 2.0, a popular XML format.
The accepted payment type is among the optional information sellers can provide for each product. The following is a snippet of the XML code I submitted to Google. I’m confident that you don’t need to be an XML guru to understand this code:

<g:payment_accepted>
    MasterCard
</g:payment_accepted>

<g:payment_accepted>
    Visa
</g:payment_accepted>

<g:payment_accepted>
    PayPal
</g:payment_accepted>

A few hours after the upload I received a notification that the syntax of my XML feed was not valid. Here is the error message I got:

cvc-enumeration-valid: 
Value 'PayPal' is not facet-valid 
with respect to enumeration 
'[Cash, Check, Cheque, Visa, MasterCard,
Discover, AmericanExpress,
WireTransfer, GoogleCheckout]'.
It must be a value from the enumeration.

Translation in plain English: You specify that your online store accepts payment by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. For Google Base, PayPal is not a syntactically valid option, while GoogleCheckout is.

Is this just an oversight? Should we blame the omittance of PayPal on a Google programmer who perhaps forgot to include PayPal (Google Checkout's competition) in the list of payment options?

Or is this a poor implementation of the Google motto “Don’t be evil”?

Franco Folini

P.S.: According to this online Google Base Schema (line 419) PayPal is a syntactically valid option for payment, while Google Checkout is not even listed.  I guess this is not the Schema used to validate my feed. I would not recommend to check the XML schema if you are not familiar with XML.

Novedge Now Offers PayPal Checkout

I'm proud to announce that Novedge is now offering the power, security, and user protection of PayPal checkout. According to PayPal, 43% of North American online shoppers have used PayPal, while 24% of North American online buyers consider PayPal their favorite way to pay online.

Starting today, Novedge customers have the option to choose between the easy and reliable Novedge checkout or the popular PayPal checkout. I believe this is an important feature for all our customers and visitors.

we never store credit card information

At Novedge we take data security very seriously. We use the most advanced technologies and tools to protect our customer data and to make every purchase as safe and simple as possible. One important thing many of our customers don't know is that we never store credit card information, regardless of the checkout process you choose. When you add a product to the Novedge shopping cart and you choose the Novedge checkout, the website will ask for your credit card information. As we receive your information, we forward it to Authorize.net, our credit card service. In a matter of seconds, we receive a confirmation and a transaction ID from them. During the entire process, your credit card number and expiration date are never stored on our servers. Personally, I believe that not storing credit card numbers is the best way to protect our customers and Novedge.

With PayPal checkout, we've added an additional level of security. If you have a PayPal account, you can choose to rely on PayPal for the payment to Novedge. The integration between Novedge and PayPal is complete and should provide a smooth purchasing experience. If you click on the "PayPal checkout" button on the Novedge shopping cart, you will be redirected to the PayPal website where you will have to login and complete the transaction. Then you will be redirected back to a Novedge page that will provide you with your order number and a link to your invoice.

From a business point of view we don't expect any huge increase in sales as reported by other merchants, such as Michael Roebuck. Michael claimed a 300% increase in sales! I think of PayPal more as a service to our customer than as a sales-booster. According to PayPal, most businesses get a more reasonable average sales lift of 14% by accepting PayPal.

I found PayPal documentation not very well organized

Note for web developers: if you plan to integrate your shopping cart with PayPal, it will take just a few days of work. The integration is easy and doesn't require any special skills, apart from the usual web techniques. In our experience, the major difficulties come from adapting your shopping cart style and approach to the pre-defined PayPal style and approach. For example, PayPal likes to have a shipping cost defined for each individual item in the shopping cart while many websites, e.g. Novedge, have more sophisticated ways to calculate the shipping cost. Some problems can also arise from the PayPal documentation. Contrary to Wikipedia opinion, I found PayPal documentation not very well organized. You may have to look at several documents, each one focused on one specific topic, and will have to figure out the whole picture mostly by yourself.

Franco Folini