As eBay prepares to welcome users to its hometown of San Jose to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, rumors began circulating that Google was readying a payment wallet that would compete with eBay's PayPal service.

The Wall Street Journal Online reported Friday evening that ChannelAdvisor's CEO Scot Wingo made reference to a Google Wallet payment service at a Piper Jaffray Internet conference on Thursday. Wingo was participating on a panel discussion called, "e-Commerce­Is There a Version 3.0?" with Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com and a representative from Shopping.com (set to be acquired by eBay later this year). Google has not responded to the reports.

Google has a built-in audience it could utilize with its AdWords and AdSense programs, according to Eric Jackson, author of "The PayPal Wars" and former Director of Marketing at PayPal. "Google has a strong relationship - and financial relationship - with ecommerce sites on the Internet," Jackson said. Google could bundle a payment service with its Froogle service for a strong competing platform to eBay, especially now that eBay is showing weaknesses, Jackson said.

Jackson compares Froogle (http://www.froogle.com) to PayPal Shops (http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shop-ext). "PayPal never saw PayPal Shops as a way to compete against eBay, it was a way to get merchants to adopt PayPal," Jackson said.

Jackson believes Google will continue to refine Froogle. "It's easy for Google to aggregate content, they can centralize content and make it pleasant for buyers," Jackson said.

The respect Google enjoys from content publishers could also make it a natural micropayment solution for purchases of newspaper articles, market research reports and music downloads. Dave Winer reported that Google is readying a music download service to compete with iTunes.

In discussion forums, the consensus seems to be that if anyone has a chance to go up against eBay, it's Google.

A Google Wallet by October could make an interesting holiday shopping season.

http://archive.scripting.com/2005/06/15#When:6:18:31PM