Google Wallet: Newest Feature Will Have E-Commerce Running For Cover

Impact

Watch out PayPal, Square, VenMo, WePay, and everyone else in the mobile payment market. The 800-pound gorilla of tech is now in the ring. On Wednesday Google announced at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, a new feature named Google Wallet.

Google Wallet is elegantly simple, with a $ icon that you can click to attach a monetary transaction to an email in the same way one might attach a photo or PDF to an email. In addition you will be able to use your Google Wallet to shop in stores using your smartphone in a PIN-protected app. For those concerned about what might happen if you lose your phone, Google has thought about that too, with 100% protection for unauthorized purchases and a feature to disable the app if you lose your phone.

The fee structure of Google Wallet will likely look very familiar to you if you've ever used PayPal. With a flat fee of 2.9% per transaction (minimum $0.30), it looks very similar to PayPal's basic structure, which puts a 2.9% transaction fee on the total sale amount plus a $0.30 fee per transaction. 

The feature will be rolled out over the coming months to all U.S. Gmail users over 18 years old, but users can get earlier access if friends have the feature and send money to them.

As someone who's previously used Google Ads to drive app downloads for business reasons, I'd be very excited to have Wallet integrated as it would allow Google Analytics to cover the entire pipeline from ad to purchase with no issues regarding different platforms measuring performance using differing parameters. Being able to track the profitability of every ad directly along with email marketing would be a game-changer not just for e-commerce companies, but also for mobile ad networks and the Android app marketplace.

Because this news was just announced, it's too early to see how other e-commerce startups will react now that their business model has a much bigger competitor.