Google to add online payments, analyst says

Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, will start an online payment system this month that will challenge EBay Inc.'s PayPal and let Google offer more targeted ads, an analyst wrote.

GBuy, which will begin on June 28, will handle purchases between shoppers and merchants, RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan wrote today in a note to investors. Participating sellers will be listed as ``trusted GBuy merchant'' in Google search results, he said.

Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has confirmed that Mountain View, California-based Google is working on a payment system to make it easier for users to buy products online. The move counters an initiative by EBay, the world's largest Internet auctioneer, which last month formed an alliance with Yahoo! Inc. for Internet advertising and online payments.

``Consumers now view Google as the main starting point for the Internet,'' Rohan, who rates Google shares ``outperform,'' said today in an interview. ``That centrality gives Google a huge advantage.''

Shares of Google fell $6.73 to $386.57 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. They have fallen 6.8 percent this year.

The product will generate transaction fees for Google and purchase data may help the company identify which search keywords are most likely to generate sales and increase the cost of those ads, Rohan said. He said he learned details of GBuy from merchants who are testing the software.

Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv didn't return a call seeking comment and an e-mail to Google's public relations department wasn't answered.

Google's Schmidt, 51, first said last June that the company was developing an online-payments service. Last month he said the system, which doesn't yet have a name, isn't a ``stored value'' system similar to EBay's PayPal.

The company has registered the domain name googlepayments.com, according to Internet registration records.

"We are experimenting in making the whole advertiser buy cycle faster,'' Schmidt said at the conference in Las Vegas. ``If you get a stop watch and you time how long these things take, they take way too long in an online, instantaneous world.''

Yahoo, whose Web site is the most-visited in the U.S., on May 25 agreed to exclusively use EBay's PayPal system. In return, EBay agreed to use Yahoo software exclusively to post ads on its site.

--Bloomberg 2006-06-09

And, I'll lay odds that it won't work in Thailand, or can't be linked to a Thai bank account, or some equally innane means of stopping it being useful