Google tests Web buying system

“It’s not like PayPal at all,” Schmidt said when asked about “GBuy” during a New York meeting hosted by Conde Nast’s new Portfolio business magazine.

“It makes no sense for us to go into businesses that are occupied by existing leaders,” he said. “We want to solve new problems in the payments space.”

Why not? Given how many of us are thoroughly frustrated with Paypal and given that there is no other service doing exactly the same thing - there’s more than enough room for competition. Please. Give us P2P payment options without the bullying.

“Google management is getting off on a technicality” in saying its purchasing system differs from PayPal, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan of Schmidt’s remarks. “A merchant-to-consumer payments system, that’s close enough.”

Oh, please. If that’s all it takes, then any website that allows sellers to accept payments from buyers is just like PayPal, and I’m sorry, but no. Amazon and ClickBank and all the other online merchant account services have a ways to go before they cover all the flexibility that PayPal offers. I liked PayPal, until they drove me up the wall, and now I’d give almost anything not to have to go back to them, but if Google’s payment system isn’t going to be a competitor, I may have to go back to PayPal anyway. Too many freelance and telecommuting jobs insist on paying via PayPal only.

In a research note last week, Rohan wrote that Google was likely to launch such a service by the end of the month, saying there was no reason it could not expand to consumer-to-consumer transactions like many PayPal payments.

When? This is what I want to see; when can this come about? If Google doesn’t choose to expand to this, then it doesn’t matter if there’s no reason they can’t; they won’t.