Posted by Andy Diamondstein, Checkout Team Based on feedback from a ton of developers, we've just completed a major overhaul of the Google Checkout Developer's Guide . The new guide is designed to give you an overview of how Google Checkout works and what features it offers. The overview then links to additional documents that let you drill down into the inner workings of specific features. So whether you're selling digital goods , calculating your own shipping costs ,

Shantanu Shah - Google Checkout Team One of the most requested features of Google Checkout is to provide buyers with shipping rates for the major shipping carriers. So we're pleased to announce support for carrier-based shipping calculations for FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service. Since we do the shipping calculations, you can also use this feature instead of having to set up a handler for Merchant-calculated shipping .

Posted by Peng Ying, Google Checkout Team Did you ever want to modify a Buy Now button, or include tax and shipping fees? Now you can! Buy Now buttons are now generated using the HTML API. What this means is that you can edit the values without creating a new Buy Now button. For example a new Buy Now button for Peanut Butter will now look like: <form action= "https://checkout.google.

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team "Plan to throw one away; you will anyway", Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month In May, we released Java sample code for the Google Checkout API that simplified integration and had no dependency on JDK version. Today we're releasing the final update of that sample code, including bug fixes and new API features -you can download it here . In addition to the final update for the Java sample code,

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team In today's interview, Renaud Visage, CTO of Eventbrite , an online events registration application, explains how he uses the Google Checkout API in Eventbrite, and describes Events Plus , their cool new Facebook application, that is just like Facebook Events but lets you collect money online for your events. Eventbrite is written in Python, and Renaud does not yet use Evgeniy Tarassov's excellent Google Checkout Python library ,

Posted by Jason Costa, Google Checkout Team In addition to our open-source sample code , we're also interested in collaborating with you on Checkout-specific articles, so we recently put all of our Checkout tutorials on a wiki . If you've ever had an experience that might fit in nicely with one of the current cookbook articles, please share it with the rest of the community so that other developers may leverage your experiences in their own integration.

Posted by Annand Sharma, Google Checkout Team Do you know about the address-filters tag? If you're using Merchant Calcualtions you must use address-filters to specify restricted and allowed shipping areas. For example, if you set your address-filters to indicate that you only ship to the lower 48 states, and a buyer selects an address in Hawaii, the buyer will see a message indicating the seller does not ship to the location.

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team If you want to implement the Notification API or if you want to perform Merchant Calculations for tax and shipping, Google Checkout requires a valid SSL certificate installed on your server. Until now, we've been accepting SSL certificates issued by a limited number of SSL Certificate Authorities )CA(. However, we've added 50 additional root CAs to our list, so you can easily find a suitable SSL certificate for your callback handler.

Posted by Graeme Roche, Associate Product Manager Starting today, Google Checkout will begin providing additional support for digital goods such as software and music. Users have always been able to buy and sell digital goods with Google Checkout but we want to be able to offer an improved user experience tailored specifically to digital goods.

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team Next in our series of developer interviews is Evgeniy Tarassov, a Russian developer based in France that I met at Google Developer Day 2007 Paris in Paris. Evgenyi works for a small company called TT-Solutions . For one of his contracting jobs he had to integrate Google Checkout in a Django application, so he wrote gchecky , a Python open source library for the Google Checkout API. Evgeniy talks about the gchecky project,

Posted by Jason Costa, Google Checkout Team Are you using the HTML API and interested in specifying shipping & taxes for locations worldwide? Our newest tutorial shows you how to translate elements from the XML API into HTML parameters so that you can specify shipping and taxes for any country where Google Checkout is available to buyers .

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team Who would be best to initiate our series of developer interviews than Robin Kohli from E-Junkie? Robin is a star in the Google Checkout developer community: he's the top non-Google poster in the developer Forum , and his "fat free" shopping cart application is a great way to get started selling with Google Checkout in a matter of minutes. Here's an example of what E-Junkie cart looks like from a user perspective,

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team Wednesday June 27th we will present the Google Checkout API at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona. I will go over the API, the Google Checkout Java SDK , and the Mendoza testing server, and Thomas Steiner will present his work on code generation for REST APIs . Join us if you're in the area.

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team As the developer knowledge base and developer community for Google Checkout continue to grow, we're seeing a number of helpful resources and materials scattered across various places, which can make it difficult for you to find what you need. To help keep things organized, we've started to collect bookmarks for links to resources and materials of benefit to merchants in the process of integrating with Google Checkout.

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team Every synchronous and asynchronous message generated by Google Checkout includes an attribute called serial-number in the root element as shown here: <request-received xmlns="http://checkout.google.com/schema/2" serial-number ="58ea39d3-025b-4d52-a697-418f0be74bf9"/> <new-order-notification xmlns="http://checkout.google.

Posted by: Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team If you have implemented the Notification API to receive notifications via your API callback handler, we want to let you know that we have shortened the notification retry period from 30 days to 14 days. This means that Google Checkout will attempt to deliver the same notification message to your API callback URL until your system responds to the notification properly, or until 14 days have elapsed.

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team Did you know that you can include any of the XML API tags in the HTML API? Our Help Center article shows you three simple rules to enable you to translate any XML element to an HTML parameter, and some examples to get you started. Feel free to comment on this technique or post your questions on this thread .

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team If you are a developer in Buenos Aires and missed yesterday's talk, I'll give a similar talk today at 4 pm at Instituto Tecnologico de Buenos Aires )ITBA( . Thanks to Bruno Rovagnati for organizing this session.

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team Today at 6:30 pm I'll give a talk at Opera Bay in Buenos Aires, as part of the Globant Tech Update: "Six Google APIs for Don Isidro Parodi. Let's help Don Isidro build a better web site using 6 Google APIs" . I'll talk about Ajax Search, Maps, KML, Google Data, Google Checkout and Google Web Toolkit. If you're in Buenos Aires, join the fun.

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team JavaOne starts next week in San Francisco. Our team prepared a great session titled Fun and Profit with the Google Checkout API in Java Technology . I will present the excellent new Java sample code that my British colleague Simon Smith designed. Our sample code went through 2 refactorings recently so it's simpler than ever. And then my new colleague Inderjeet Singh will integrate the Java Petstore 2.