Google has announced that due to the success of offering free services through 2006, that they have extended the deal for all of next year. "From now through December 31, 2007, we'll process all of your Checkout transactions for free", says Gavin Chan, Google's Product Marketing Director for Google Checkout.

The company has also announced more options for the merchant service, including different types of coupons, e-mail invoicing, and HTML API integration. Read more at the Google Checkout blog.

On his Internet Business Journal blog, Mark Quarles outlines a "hole" in 1ShoppingCart that can allow technically savvy visitors to your website to purchase your products for much less that what you have intended.  Mark provides the full details in this post, however the gist of the problem is by not deleting old testing URLs once shopping cart testing has completed.  This problem can also apply to Clickbank Item ID URLs as well.

Google is giving away t-shirts today to customers who make a purchase of $20 or more through the company's new payment service, Google Checkout.  The offer is only valid for one day.

Randfish of SEOmoz.org has discovered that Google will place a green shopping cart icon on those AdWords ads whose merchants use Google Checkout. One can only suspect this increases CTR by making the ad stand out from the crowd. Read Randfish's post here.

Google is rumored to offer customers a rebate if they make purchases through GBuy, their new online payment service. The service could debut as early as next week.

According to Netcraft, phishers have found a hole on PayPal's website allowing them to inject their fraudulent messages onto the real paypal.com site.