Internet giant Google is expected to unveil its long-awaited online payments system this week, an attempt to carve out a larger portion of the worldwide web.
The system, called Gbuy, is supposed to form the backbone of a payments system that will facilitate both consumer-to-merchant and consumer-to-consumer transactions.
Google is expected to allow merchants to use the system for free during the beta stage, thereby developing merchant relationships.
After beta, Google is expected to charge a small fee (1.5% to 2%) per transactions, lower than the 1.9% to 2.9%, plus 30 cents per transaction, charged by eBay's PayPal service.
On its search result pages, Google will designate each merchant accepting GBuy as a "trusted GBuy merchant," to encourage consumers to view the merchant as safe.
GBuy will also be another way for the Google to charge merchants more for advertising.
The payment system captures all transaction data flow and lets Google see which categories and keyword bids produce the most hits and sales, creating a huge database of financial transactions among users.
