I'd posted earlier that I'd found evidence that Google was extending their payments system to purchases of physical products. There's been a lot of speculation recently, especially by PayPal's president, that Google was getting into the payments business. But Google's capabilites are looking more like order management to support a marketplace than just payments.

While there's no question that Google now has a payments capability (we've seen very simple and intuitive payments using Google Accounts on Google Video), this is the first time I've seen the Google Account used to purchase physical products.

And I'd assessed that it was unlikely Google would compete with PayPal in the "person to person" payments business, but it's more likely that payments were a key component of Google's marketplace for content and perhaps other products. When Google is the market maker, a payments service is essential to settle the transaction and retain a slice for Google.

Now that I've completed my transaction at the Google Store, I can see that it's more than just payments -- it's an order management system. Google shows me my purchase history (from any vendor), the current state of my order, and allows me to send messages to the vendor.

It's starting to look like a platform that can support a broad range of commerce, both in electronic content and physical products, with Google extending its strength in search to make markets and handle distribution, order management and settlement.