Contacting Google Checkout – Merchant Customer Service, Infuriating
It’s a widely accepted fact that Google has the worst customer service of the big 3 ( Microsoft, Apple, and Google) consumer tech companies. While Apple and Microsoft have established elaborate systems to handle customer interaction, Google relies almost solely on web forums in order to provide service to their users.
Google Checkout’s customer service system is no exception to the rule. The merchant help forum can be found at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants but getting responses can be hit or miss at times. Sometimes you’ll receive a useful reply right away, sometimes you’ll receive no reply at all… The forum setting also makes it difficult to get support for issues that are private in nature or at the very least require you to share sensitive company or customer information.
There is a direct email address which Google checkout service members use to reply to all service requests: checkout-support@google.com however, if you try to initiate communication directly via that email address you’ll receive the following message:
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Google. We’d like to assist you, but we only
respond to messages submitted through the contact form in our Help Center.
Submitting your question through the Help Center will allow us to assist
you faster. For your convenience, we’ve provided a short list of support
resources to help you resubmit your question:Buyer Help Center
http://checkout.google.com/supportUpdates or questions about an existing mediation
http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=claimbMerchant Help Center
https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/All other Google products
http://www.google.com/support/We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from
you.Sincerely,
The Google Checkout Team
If you follow the instructions in the email, you’ll wind up at the Google Checkout Merchant Help Center, which is home to a fairly expansive list of self-help topics, in order to usher you to a resolution of your issue. While these topics do offer support for a myriad for issues from setup and integration to return policies and charge-back procedures, they’re almost useless if you run into an unexpected issue, bug, or if you simply don’t understand your problem and are not sure what category it may fall into. Handling issues in a timely manor has a great amount of influence in customer’s perception of your company and their overall happiness with their experience. Being forced to sift through a myriad of help unrelated help topics with the hope of finding an answer to your time sensitive issue can be… well, infuriating. Especially because many of those issues can be easily resolved within a few minutes by a live, knowledgeable support representative.
If you’re unable to find an answer to your problem, you can use the The “Contact Us” link located on this page. You’ll be presented with a paltry list of support options which almost assuredly will not cover your issue:
- Getting started
- Manage your money
- Manage your account
- Integration
- Increase revenue with Google
As far as I’m aware, your best bet is to pick a random option and send a request for contact. You’ll receive a generic canned email response from checkout-support@google.com giving you additional details about which-ever subject you chose. Go ahead and reply to that email with the full details about your actual problem. An actual person tends to respond within a within a few days or so. I have had to wait for over a week for responses, even in the middle of a conversation. It seems to me that these email tickets are bounced around from representative to representative. Occasionally it will become apparent that a different person is responding to you because they’re completely clueless about the issue, even though you’ve responded directly within the same conversation.
For the record: this is also the type of service your customers can expect if they experience an issue with a payment they’ve made to you. If the issue happens to be outside of the realm of what Google has accounted for, you’ll quickly find yourself with a disgruntled customer and no way to provide support yourself… that’s just bad business.
