Friday, September 08, 2006
The experience we’ve had with Google Checkout has been very rewarding in terms of learning, website traffic, sales, and saving money, so we’d like to share a bit of our story.
WeaKnees is a company that my friend Jeff Shapiro and I started a little over five years ago, based on our love of TiVo. We sell a huge variety of capacity-enhancement kits and parts, replacement parts, and most of all, new TiVos with huge capacity - up to 1800 hours of recording space or 200 hours of HD recording capacity.
Our workforce is almost always fewer than 10 people, and most of our customers haven't heard of us before their initial purchase. Google Checkout has been a perfect fit for a relatively small company like us -- from the buyer's point of view, they don't need to trust us with their payment data to purchase our products. Many are also happy to avoid re-entering information on our website that they've entered countless times before (name, address, etc.). They simply provide their Checkout login and password, and they're one step away from finishing the transaction.
From our perspective, the benefits go deeper. In addition to capturing extra business through increasing customer confidence, the Google Checkout badge is key. We receive a greater clickthrough rate, which raises our AdWords ranking without raising our cost. And, on top of that, we avoid paying fees for the credit card processing.
Through the last two months we've seen our Google Checkout volume increase weekly and we look forward to continuing that trajectory.
