Google Checkout is now offering a way for users to sell subscriptions. This is a feature that has apparently been requested quite heavily.

"Merchants will now have the ability to sell products and services that require recurring billing using our API," explains Software Engineer Andrew Cunningham. "So if you’re already comfortable building your own carts using Checkout, you’re ready to implement Subscriptions by consulting the documentation."

In processing subscriptions through Google Checkout, each billing recurrence is a new order. Users can use the Google-Handled Subscriptions option to let Google handle the details or the Merchant-Handled Subscriptions option to maintain more control.

In other Google Checkout news, Google has made its installation easier for osCommerce. "We’ve completely reworked the installation process by no longer requiring users to manually copy and paste large swaths of PHP code into their files," explains Ed Davisson on the Google Checkout Blog.

"Instead, we’ve created an automated deployment app that does this for you by looking for the appropriate PHP insertion points and adding the code where it’s needed," he continues. "This should ease concerns about lines of PHP getting copied into the wrong place. If you want to learn more about the installation process, you can take a look at our documentation that contains a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots showing exactly how it works."

Google has also simplified the post-deployment configuration. The most important fields are now grouped together for easier accessibility. The others have been moved to a detailed control panel.

It’s good to see Google Checkout is at least making some improvements soon after it raised fees for users. That went down earlier this month. You can read about it here.