ceedee's posterous

Amy Hoy highlights a significant problem with Checkout's human-free fraud prevention system and Google's Kafkaesque unaccountability:

Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don't use Google Checkout for your business

Wanting to offer an alternative to PayPal, we set up a Google Checkout account for people to buy our ebook.
The last email we received about our Google Checkout account was "Helpful tips regarding your first Google Checkout orders" on February 9th.
But a few days ago, I logged in, and this is what greeted me:

And if you click that link, "I had pending payouts for charged orders. Will I receive these payouts?", you'll see that the answer is "Nope, you're screwed."

So, to sum up our experience with Google Checkout:

• they did not try to contact us to resolve any issue
• there's no way to find out why they closed our account, due to "security reasons"
• there was no notice (we found out by accident, when we tried to pay for something with Google Checkout)
• they kept over $200 of our money
• there is no appeal
• there is no one we can contact
• we cannot open a new account
• our money is gone, even though people have received their products

For Amy's sake, I hope somebody influential within Google gets to hear about this, let alone the countless millions of other small businesses across the world who can easily fall foul of Google's 'secret' procedures.

You'd have thought Google would be eager to fix this ludicrous 'Catch 22' before online businesses lose trust in Checkout...