Almost two months after the introduction of Google Checkout Donna Bogatin at ZDNet finds it “is not turning out to be the eBay PayPal killer that was speculated at launch.” While Checkout and PayPal are in fact not direct competitors, one is simply a credit card gateway and the other is a complete payment alternative, Checkout is losing business over technical problems and unsatisfactory support.

Bogatin reports that Levi.com has stopped using Checkout because of “performance shortcomings” and also points to an article on IDG News Service describing one Kirby Witmer’s experience with Checkout,

He attempted two different purchases from Buy.com Inc., but both transactions failed due to what Google described to him later as Checkout technical ‘issues,’ giving him ‘a 100 percent failure rate.’ Getting the orders canceled took over two weeks and multiple communications with Google and Buy.com.

I’m still not convinced that Checkout will be a complete failure, but it is certainly looking bad. Do you have experiences using the system, either good or bad? Of all companies I would think Google could launch a product with the technical aspects worked out. After a few months the service should be all fleshed out, but will the damage already have been done?