Google Checkout is one of the online payment gateways available, Google Checkout launched as an alternative service to PayPal but it never got any traction. PayPal is still the leader in this space and it offers rich functionality for setting up online store, but it needs some kind of technical knowledge to set it up and running. If you want to sell stuff online and don’t have a big budget to setup an online store, Google Checkout blog has an interesting post the explains how to setup a simple online store using Google Docs as inventory managing tool and Google Checkout as a payment management application.
Follow these three steps as Google describes:
1. Sign up for a Google Checkout seller account.
Checkout will process your orders and help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy advanced fraud protection.
2. List the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
You’ll just need to create a copy of our template spreadsheet, and then replace the sample inventory with your own.
3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website.
You can embed your online store anywhere you’d like — on Google Sites, Blogger, or your personal website.
For the convenience of the users Google created a sample template for Google docs which you can use to manage inventory, all you have to do is modify the spreadsheet cell values according to your product descriptions and prices. Once you are done with it go to this Google Checkout store gadget in Google labs and setup the store. Keep in mind the gadget is experimental and so could break things. Then embed the code wherever you want the store to appear.
This may not the be the best option to setup an online store, but it is by far the easiest way to setup online store and keep it running. As Google claims, it just takes few minutes to set this up. If you have a large inventory to sell there are several open source scripts available for creating online store like Zencart.
