According to Valleywag, a Silicon Valley rumors blog, Google has a secret project codenamed Trogdor. Trogdor is a webpage editor (like front page or dreamweaver) that enables developers to create easy Ajax-based webpages.
This editor would be a good support to the gbuy product. Small merchants, usually web entrepreneurs with some technical skills, have two ways to receive payments on their ecommerce site:
- Integrating with the payment processor's API through SOAP, Get requests, POST requests, etc. This requires realtively advanced technical skills like server-side scripting, sessions management, etc.
- Creating a link or 'html code snippet' and adding it on their webpage. A customer would click on the link, get redirected to a page hosted by the payment provider, complete the payment, and then redirected to the merchant's webpage.
The second option is the easier one in terms of programming skills. And it usually entails copying and pasting code from the payment provider's website to the merchant's page. The task of creating and managing those links gets tiresome after a while.
If the webpage editor is connected in some way to the payment provider then it would make it much more convenient to the merchant to manage those links.
In other words the merchant would be able to create a new product (listing its name, price, description, etc) straight from the editor and get the appropriate link immediately by clicking on a button.
Payment providers have done something similar in the past. For example PayPal offers plugins to popular website editing programs to make the task of integrating payments easier. But they never went as far as creating a complete editor from the ground up.
This move should make it easier for Google to grab the rightmost part of the web merchants long tail: the many merchants with low-volume transactions.
(image courtesy of Wikipedia )
