Hi everyone. I've been working on this at Google for a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. If you don't want to ask here, feel free to email me at <my username> AT google.com. There might be a delay in responding if I get a lot of messages or if you have a particularly challenging question.
My question is: when you send emails like "it has come to our attention... fraudulent activity..." [1] [2] and confiscate $30,000+ earnings by shutting down long-standing AdSense accounts, will you do the same to the entire Gmail accounts, or just to the money transferring functionality?
One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.
Paypal is terrible, but at least you can get on the phone and talk to someone when things get hairy. Every time I have google support issues I end up waiting days or weeks for automatic replies that don't even address the issue.
To the sibling post: actually Rackspace has horrible support. They regularly experience downtime and outages and never notify customers or update their status blog. Can you get someone on the phone? Yes. Do they have anything of value to offer you? No. My favorite was when they referred me to their twitter feed, which hadn't (at the time) been posted to in 9 months.
That's not really horrible. Horrible is when AdSense shuts your account with $15k/mo revenue, confiscates $30k earnings already on the account, refuses to tell you why (a template response) and there is absolutely no human you can call and discuss this.
How does Stripe have great support? I had to wait two days for a reply. The advice I got was very good, but the response time doesn't make for "great" support.
Stripe has amazing support, even proactively reaching out when weird things happen:
Got a 500 error back from their API once and had an email from one of their engineers in my inbox almost immediately after to find out what happened and resolve it (my http lib was using stale DNS).
Paypal is actually much better. When you reach about 10k/mo, they give you a special representative from the account management team, with a special phone number, and those guys are quite smart and easily available. First hand knowledge.
As the service is connected to your email and your Google+ accounts, it's possible that Google can determine actual frauds with much more accurately than, for example, Paypal. Google is a data company after all, and I'd be surprised if they don't employ big data techniques to build trust networks and pinpoint frauds.
No one can determine fraud with absolutely no false positives. If there is no way to "appeal", then those false positives (no matter how few) will be thoroughly screwed.
Let's say I use this to pay for something I've purchased online, and I later realize the seller is a scammer and want to issue a chargeback. Will that be possible? What are your plans for this situation?
If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?
Well, that's a good answer. I feel like this is something one can't do for 99% of other google products although I haven't tried it. Is this as rare as I think it is?
You realize that Google does not have the best reputation when it comes to talking to a real human being? Personally, I hope this is where that begins to change.
I had a prepard card setup with Google Wallet when it first came out. Then that card was discontinued by Google. I had $100 loaded onto that card. When I asked Google for a refund (September of 2012), first the form to submit a refund request wasn't working, then I couldn't get a hold of a human to talk to. After doing some googling (maybe 1-2 hours), I found the phone number to call customer service. When I got to talk to a person, they were unaware of the Prepaid card being discontinued. Because of this, they were also unable to give me a refund. Then I called again, seemed like the same person picked up, and I told again to fill in the online request form. Somehow, the second time, the form did work. But it's been way over the allotted time to receive my refund from Prepaid refund, how does Google expect to send money and actually get my rent, deposit, gift, or anything I use Paypal for to not be held up on their servers somewhere?
I'm a software engineer at Google and I just wanted to let you know how to get your money back!
I'm sorry if we weren't properly indexed when the card was retired, but as of now searching for 'google wallet prepaid refund' returns the correct link at the top. (With the phone support number on the 'Contact Us' sub-page listed there[1].)
Since we had special support staff for this refund (and Wallet in general), I suspect that the number you found was not the correct one, which would explain the confusion. I've used the Wallet customer support, and have always been impressed, so I'm hoping that really is what happened.
I can't tell you why you haven't received your funds, but the customer support reps at that number are authorized (with your consent) to look up that information and help you out.
No. The only way to 'send' bitcoins in email is sending the keys for the coins you still own; this (of course) is stupid, since you retain control, so it becomes a race to see which one of the people with the keys transfers them to an address they solely own first.
Is there any chance of getting your Gmail account shut down because of suspicious transactions etc with wallet? I understand that with a service like wallet Google will need to shut down accounts that look like they might be fraudulent (even though often it might turn out not to be) but it would be good to have a guarantee that they won't take the Gmail account down with it.
Also directly under the line "Google Wallet is now integrated into Gmail", accompanied by screenshots. I wasted time looking for it, too, before coming back and seeing the "* ha ha not really" text.
I want to make use of this sooner rather than later. Is the rollout completely random or determined by some other meaningful factor. Lets say I connect my bank account with Google Wallet now, would that put me in line above someone without a bank account associated with their Google Wallet?
The rollout is such that when you successfully claim money you've been sent, you'll be able to send money from Gmail about 30 minutes after that. (It will be a couple weeks if your account is on an Apps domain and your domain administrator has not opted in to the faster feature release cycle.)
We're sending money to the I/O attendees first, and then they'll be able to send money to their friends, and so on.
As a counterpoint, I never use Interac for payments precisely because I can use my credit card and get all the benefits that offers: rewards, zero liability, deferred payment, etc. The only place I use debit is at Tim Horton's if I don't have cash as they don't accept Visa.
This looks awesome, but not at all core to Google's core revenue generators (gmail isn't, either, and this is on top of gmail...). Not to be a dick, but how do we know we can trust adopting this? For user to user payments it's not a big deal to switch to/from this, but for anything else, ...
Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, transactions delayed, etc. when money is involved. Google historically doesn't have a good track record for "hand holding customer service".
Why do you think that Gmail is not a core product for Google just because it's not the primary revenue generator? Gmail is a very important user identifier, is probably quite critical for personalized ads, has high usage numbers, and most likely* is revenue positive via ads within Gmail. Quite unlike all the shut down projects, won't you say?
Yeah, you could consider GMail a loss-leader if you'd like. People rely on the email as an essential life service...and -- how nice -- there's some easy-to-use paid features integrated into it.
Just like how gas stations make more money from a cup of coffee than 10 gallons of unleaded.
It probably generates enough revenue to be protected, but it isn't Adwords, search, or Adsense. It is probably less important than android. I'm not sure if it is more or less important than Chrome.
Not core to their actual revenues but it'll help massivly in knowing who are real users. Easy to automatically fake gmail/google plus accounts that look realistic. An account with real payments going to/from it is likely to be real, and can be tied to all their other services. And obviously when paying for things on youtube (which will become more popular soon) it will be as easy for youtube/gmail users, as it is for iOS users to pay for in app purchases.
Can you withdraw money with Wallet in as many countries as with Paypal, though? That has always been the biggest adoption hurdle, I think. If not, what has taken you guys so long to do it? I want Google Wallet to be a real Paypal competitor, but it doesn't seem to be - or at least it hasn't been until now.
Not on this topic, but maybe you know someone. From some countries (e.g. Georgia, Europe), why it is delayed to add support for selling the paid apps in the google play market?
I might have missed this in the keynote. However, what was the original drive to provide such a feature inside of gmail. Also will this work on gmail for mobile devices?
