On Wednesday 11th March, Google announced they were scraping their attractive 1.5% + 15p fee structure in favour of a new tiered fee structure, which just so happens to be identical to Paypal.

Google informed their checkout users via email that their hunnymoon period was over by stating 'The rate you will be charged beginning on 5 May 2009 will be based on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April 2009. Each month thereafter, we'll continue to use the prior month's sales volume to determine your transaction processing rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html?hl=en&gl=GB'

Monthly Sales Through Google Checkout	Fees Per Transaction
Less than £1500	3.4% + £0.20
£1500 - £5999.99	2.9% + £0.20
£6000 - £14999.99	2.4% + £0.20
£15000 - £54999.99	1.9% + £0.20
£55000 or more	1.4% + £0.20

An additional 1% fee will be assessed on transactions where the merchant's country is different from the buyer's billing country. With 10 days notice, we may also charge higher transaction processing fees to merchants that incur excessive chargebacks or otherwise pose financial risk to Checkout.

To summarise, unless you process over £55,000 of transactions monthly, you're now worse off!

Senderon is sad to see this happen as we believed with their flat rate and excellent level service, our decision to integrate CAMS v2 with the Google Checkout system would have made it one of the most cost effective e-commerce solutions available.

Following this announcement from Google, we are looking into the possiblity of integrating both Google and Paypal conncurrently since there is now no financial reason to choose between the two.

With regard to the CAMS v2 project, we are in the process of setting up several fully managed sites, and expect the service to go on general release before we reach Q3 2009.