Paypay vs. Google Checkpoint vs. Microsoft Wallet

Have you ever bought an item off ebay? (one of my favorite sites for online shopping!) If you have them you most likely have used paypal.  Much like others I have only heard of Paypal-and Google checkpoint (what the android software uses) but have never heard of Microsoft wallet.  All are digital payment services but they cater to different kinds of people.

Both google checkpoint and paypal provide you a secure site to pay for your purchases with and also have a refund policy if fraud were to happen. 

Google checkpoint just holds your credit or debit card information while you shop making sure they protect your personal information.  If you would like to sell an item on a website google checkpoint allows you to cut and paste code that will allow whoever wants to purchase your item use google checkpoint.

Paypal on the other hand lets for more advanced features!  Paypal allows you to transfer money from bank accounts.  You can also use paypal to wire money to people. 

Microsoft wallet allows users to use a digital wallet on internet explorer.  Users fill out all of their information which is then stored on Microsofts servers which allows users to log back on to the system and retrieve their data without having to fill anything out again.  Very Convenient! 

As I was reseraching about Paypal, Google checkpoint and Microsfot wallet I found that Microsoft wallet has been through many name changes and it was very diffcult to find information about the system.  I may be biased becasue of all of my Ebay shopping and using Paypal but I would recommed using Paypal if you were given the choice.  It has been very reliable and safe!


Here is a chart that compares PayPayl and Google Checkout

	PayPal	Google Checkout
Merchants	eBay, thousands of retailers	Hundreds of retailers, including Buy.com
How to make payments	Your credit card, debit card, or bank account	Your credit or debit card
Rate merchants	Yes, on eBay	Yes
International shopping	55 countries, 6 currencies (EU, CA, pound, US, yen, Australian)	No; U.S. only
Hide your e-mail address from merchants	No	Yes
Peer-to-peer payments	Yes	No
Security	SSL, same used by banks	SSL, same used by banks
Fraud protection	100 percent refund for fraudulent transactions of $50 or more	100 percent refund (must report within 60 days) for fraudulent transactions
Fee for accepting payments on your own Web site	1.9 to 2.9 percent of sales plus 30 cents per transaction	2 percent of sales plus 20 cents per transaction (less for AdWords customers)
Items you can't sell	Illegal items, weapons, adult goods, copyrighted media	Illegal items, weapons, adult goods, copyrighted media
Calculates shipping and tax	Yes	No
Users	More than 100 million	n/a

Drupal vs. Wordpress vs. Joomla

For the group project section of my web development class we were asked to pick a CMS to use.  Our three choices: Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.  So the hunt began to find the best information on which one to choose!  Here is what I found.

Drupal
Is great for advanced developers or people that love to hand-code their own websites!  This CMS system is very advanced and many say it very much resembles a developer platform more so than a CMS system. 

Wordpress
Many people instantly think that wordpress is only for blogging.  But recently it has become one of the easier CMS for users to make websites, etc. Good web practices states "Since WP is already developed to work as a blog, though, it can be setup to do so without any hesitation. Comments are already built into the system, as well as pinging services, multiple blogger profiles, trackbacks and more. Most of the time nothing needs to be done to those systems either, because they already work the way that the user would want them to."   However there are some cons.  Wordpress is hard to setup a shopping cart on your site because Wordpress was set up to be very simple and easy to use.  Adding advanced features using wordpress can be very difficult.  

Joomla
"If Wordpress is more for end-users and Drupal is more for developers, then Joomla! must be more for designers, right? If that's the conclusion that you came to then you're on the right track, but I would venture to say that Joomla!" states Good web practices.  Newcomers to the website have found that it is getting easier and easier to use because developers have added more tools to the website, making it easy to customize a great website!  There are downfalls though, it is not as easy to manipulate the code as drupal.  There are still parts of the system that you cannot customize as well as drupal. 


(image from shoutex)

Here is a video I found that should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onf_SUv61i4

Resources:
http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html
http://shoutex.com/blog/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal-choosing-a-cms/