Google Analyst Day, Payments Discussion

In a brief blog post titled "Google Purchases won't compete with PayPal? Really?," Garrett Rogers reports on comments he heard Google CEO Eric Schmidt make on the webcast "that Google is not interested in competing with PayPal because they are already doing a great job."

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker reported she was encouraged by Schmidt's inference that "it might make sense to offer eBay PayPal as an option in its payment services." Schmidt said Google is focus on solving new problems and that it “makes no sense to do what other people are doing well”

CNet News.com staff writer Elinor Mills covered the event in her article "Live: Google faces off with analysts".

Question: Google payments has been expanded to Google Base. How will it be expanded to other advertisers, like click-per-call? Is it a threat to PayPal?

Schmidt: "There's been a lot of speculation. We are on the record saying that we are not intending to compete with PayPal..."It makes no sense to compete with what others are doing well..." eBay and PayPal are very good partners to us. Google's payments approach is a tactic to solve an important problem--to have an ad turn into a purchase. The quicker we can automate that--including payment, fulfillment, etc.--the more sales there'll be."

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Verne Kopytoff reported:

Schmidt emphatically denied that Google is planning to take on eBay's dominant PayPal online payment system. Last week, it started allowing users to buy products on its Google Base classified service, using a Google Account payment service that can be funded with a credit card.