Recent remarks by Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, a Morrisville, N.C. e-commerce consulting firm, at a financial conference indicated that he thought Google would be launching against PayPal later this year.

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Now Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied this intention in a sort of non-denial fashion, stating that Google does "not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system." He did say that the company is developing "payment services (that) are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs."

Google has created a subsidiary named Google Payment Corp. One analyst said he believes Google will develop a service to complment its Froogle shopping-comparison service, rather than develop something that could potentially compete with eBay's PayPal across the board for the growing e-transaction business.

Google reported spectacular growth and profits recently, yet is highly dependent on online advertising. eBay, on the other hand, has shown recent signs of an abatement in its spectacular growth, and may appear vulnerable to investors if one of its core services, such as PayPal, were directly attacked by a powerful competitor. PayPal has 72 million account holders. It was acquired by eBay for over $1 billion in 2002.


Google CEO Eric Schmidt