"Google's M.O. is always to deny that they're competing with anyone head on," says Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst with Forrester. "It's a natural inclination for them to say that they're in their own league, but since they are about to become a marketplace for buying items, they're encroaching on this category."
Translation: Google is a marketplace, not just a search engine. Forbes quotes CEO Eric Schmidt:
"The quickest way to improve the quality of an ad is to have the ad instantaneously turn into a purchase that is 100% perfect," he said. "We now have a solution that we believe enables advertisers to offer a digital product on the Web so that when people click on it, through a credit-card mechanism, it is automatically taken care of."
Whoa. This isn't exactly eBay, but it could be bigger and better than eBay . Forbes also spends a few words on Google's reputation system:
And the Google Base/AdWords combination could also help small advertisers buff their own brand via a feedback system that attempts to rank Base sellers' credibility. Once a Google Base seller had established a credibility ranking, it could conceivably brandish the ranking on its AdWords ads.
As with the WSJ article two weeks ago, Forbes doesn't get the fee difference right, since they only compare the cost of the payment (where Google is marginally less than Paypal), and they don't show that the entire cost of the transaction is dramatically lower on Google. The Forbes article also focuses on linking Adwords to Google Base, when there's a lot more power in linking search to Base.
Conclusion: This could be a powerful new revenue stream for Google, and it's a gathering threat for eBay. Though the puts I bought on eBay haven't panned out, maybe it just takes a while for the market to grasp the fundamental shift that's happening as Google transforms from an ad marketplace to a marketplace full stop.