Google Checkout will be checking out in November

Google Checkout was supposed to be Google’s answer to traditional online merchant services, as well as Web-based payment companies like PayPal. But along came Google Wallet, which is now the horse Google is backing in the online payments race. According to a blog post published yesterday, Google Checkout will be retired on November 20th to clear the runway for Wallet to really take off.

Google is helping businesses transition to a life without Google Checkout by partnering with several services that, when combined, replicate the payment processing, invoicing and shopping cart features of Checkout — Braintree, Freshbooks and Shopify. Moving to these services will cost you some money, which doesn’t sound appealing when you’re coming from something that didn’t require a subscription. However, thanks to Google’s partnerships with these three services, you’ll be able to subscribe at a discount.

Migrating between payment systems isn’t normally a task for the novice end user, and as a result, some users of Checkout may have questions surrounding the closure of the service and how they can move over to one of Google’s transition partners. For this reason, Google is hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 23 at 1PM.

The retirement of Google Checkout is definitely going to be a pain to those who liked being able to invoice and charge from the same dashboard, or who preferred processing payments with Google as opposed to other services. But the team of Braintree, Freshbooks and Shopify is a very good option in a Checkout-less world. It won’t be free, but as we’ve learned with past Google services, everything free comes with some kind of price. In most cases, that price is a service that doesn’t stick around forever.

Are you a Google Checkout user? Let us know what you think about Google’s decision to shut it down.