Email Address Sharing and Forwarding

When a transaction occurs, Google always provides you with an email address to contact the buyer. You can send correspondence to the buyer's email address for order processing issues and, if the buyer consented to receive promotional email, for marketing purposes (see Google Checkout Program Policies and Guidelines, section 1). Depending on the buyer's preferences, the email address provided to you through Google Checkout will either be the email address that the buyer used to register with Google or an email address that forwards through Google to the buyer's registered email address. If the buyer prefers to forward email through Google and decides that he or she no longer wants to receive email from a specific merchant, the buyer can deactivate email forwarding from a specific merchant at any time.

Google Checkout's email forwarding feature helps increase the effectiveness of merchant email marketing in many ways. First, the feature gives buyers the confidence to consent to receive marketing emails, even from unfamiliar merchants. With email forwarding, the merchant sends promotional emails to a Google-maintained email address, and Google forwards the email on to the buyer. The buyer can always opt to turn off email forwarding from that merchant if the promotional emails are no longer desired. This feature may also give trusted merchants access to the buyer's primary email address for marketing. Whereas many buyers provide merchants with a separate junk email address for promotional mail, Google Checkout is more likely to forward emails directly to customers' primary email accounts. This allows the merchant to have greater access to the email account that the buyer regularly reads and uses.