Works like a charm. Huge thanks to the FB staff!  Only negative is that forum posts will probably go down about 20-30% now. I'm sure we'll think of something else to complain about though.

Keep up the great work!

William wrote:

I'm sure we'll think of something else to complain about though.

We don't think of it as "complaining". We think of it as "entertainment".



I kid, I kid. Hearing about what our customers want is really really important to us. Honestly.

I blogged last year about our "Big List" -- Worth noting that "Better invoice templates" and "Google checkout" were right at the top of that list. Feels good to get those both crossed off, let me tell you. We knew they were important to our customers and we take filling customer needs very seriously.

We have a strict policy of not promising features we haven't yet delivered, so I can't comment on what's coming up next from our doughty development team. But stay tuned -- there's plenty in the pipeline!

Keep up the great work!

Thanks!

HA HA HA!!!

James

See the lengths I will go to to get my favourite Big List items in. Complete disgrace is what I will do, and more!

Hi!  I'm so happy about GCO.  I signed up and had it working in a few minutes.  We tested it out, and I'm not sure what to do with that shipping button in GCO.  I'm a musician and I invoice people for my services.  I don't have anything to 'ship' to them.

I found a thread in Google's merchant help about it, but it says something about... you must need to digitally ship then, and click this other link, and API, and Key/URL delivery, and checkout API requests, and blah blah blah all other code and stuff I didn't understand.  Here's those links:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/c … &hl=en

http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/de … ivery.html

So I know I'm just a musician, but since I saw something that said API that I had to copy and paste to make all this work, I thought it might have something to do with how it's "talking" to FreshBooks.  But, ummm, maybe I just need to be bugging Google to make an "I don't ship things" checkbox.

Any advice/ideas?  .... cause I'm not getting in a box and shipping myself to people.

Also, put me down as a supporter of google-paella if it's on the big list.

Matt 

mattbethe,

Very good point. While Google Checkout doesn't have an "I don't ship things" checkbox, as you mention they do provide a few options for "digital goods" and "digital carts", that is, things that aren't physically shipped. Taking a quick look through the API documentation, it seems that all that was required to get rid of the shipping messaging was marking each invoice in the cart as a digital item set for email delivery. And that's it. A pleasant side effect of this is that for carts containing only digital items Google does not provide a 15 minute window within which purchasers can cancel. Net result: Google Checkout payments in FreshBooks are now authorized and processed in 20 seconds or so!

So thanks a lot for bringing this up. I think that the purchase experience is much nicer as a result of these changes.


Justin

p.s. there's one small caveat: although the purchase form and the purchase confirmation page no longer mention anything about shipping, the email sent to your client from Google still says "blah blah will charge and ship your order soon". At present, there's no way to alter this message, so an issue has been raised with the Google Checkout team (cf. http://markmail.org/message/js7egd5k6vengrbe). Until they change this the new setup is the best we can do, but I think it's pretty decent compared to what we'd originally had.

I found this about that "Ship" button:

How to Automate the click of Ship button or payment release to Merchant:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-c … a30b?fwc=1

mattbethe,

It's something that just automatically happens now.  You don't have to do anything else on your end.

I was just trying to explain that I'd made some changes to the integration that eliminate most of the shipping-related messaging from the buyer's workflow.  You'll still see shipping related tools within your seller's account because you can't remove them.  They can safely be ignored.

As far as I know, there is only one remaining mention of shipping your customers will see ("blah blah will charge and ship your order soon" in their purchase notification email sent by Google).  However, it's not possible to remove/change this message at present.

If any of your customers ask about this you can explain that it's an artifact of Google Checkout's orientation towards online business shipping physical products.  However, I don't think this should be a problem because, as I've said, almost all mention of shipping is absent from the buyer workflow.

I this helps clarify things.


Justin