The difference is, your credit card is not exposed to a seller you don’t trust, for further scandalous activities. Your email is also not exposed, preventing possible spam. But Google IS NOT, and will never be, the credit card company itself. If you have an issue, you first contact the actual buyer. It doesn’t matter if it’s for missing order receipts or an unshipped, damaged or late item, none of them are Google Checkouts responsibility. If in fact the actual seller is unreliable or won’t solve the problem, then you call your CREDIT CARD company, and let them know what happened, the credit card company will require the seller to show proof that they shipped your item or they replaced / repaired it. If they can’t, the credit card company will snatch the money right back out of their hands and give it back, they might even charge them a fee…. Stop blaming the middle man, all Google Checkout does is protect your personal info.

The reason PayPal has a dispute resolution system is because they have an entirely different system, which allows account-to-account spending, money that doesn’t go through a bank or a credit card just from one paypal user to another, therefor they are the only link between the seller and buyer, and need to supply some sort of dispute resolution.

Say you purchased a product or service from a repubtable company that uses a regular merchant account (i.e. no payment processor as the one’s mentioned). On your bank or CC statement is the name and sometimes the phone number of the company you purchased the product or service from. No mention of what bank or merchant system was used.

In other words, if this were any other transaction you would be complaining to the company, not Google Checkout. For the person that had aBuy.com issue, you admitted that you knew Buy.com had a history of this. Therefore the problem was not Google Checkout so much as it was Buy.com. Buy.com should have not set their shopping cart to allow payment. Or, they should have notified you. It is not Google Checkou’s job to let you know if there is a delay in shipping.

As for the cell phone you should have contacted the company as best you could. Once again, it’s not really Google’s job to keep tabs on your order, when it was shipped, may be shipped, or if it will even be shipped.

I think people have gotten too used to payment processors like PayPal that have a dispute resolution system. People start to get lazy and not want to contact the company they purchased the product from. They wan’t a one-click solution where they say they are not happy and expect the payment processor to investigate the entire situation.

I always wonder how payment processors can have such lower fees than real merchant systems when they are expected to do so much MORE work than a merchant account provider.