CYBERSPACE – According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. will introduce a “test version” of its new GBuy online payment system as early as tomorrow, a move designed to challenge eBay’s PayPal system and to leverage the company’s dominant share of the search-targeted advertising market into a strong push into the online payment sector.Citing a “person briefed on the company’s plans,” the Journal reported that Google also plans to offer an “unspecified rebate” to those who make purchases via GBuy, in order to attract consumers to the new system.

As described by the Journal, GBuy will be integrated with Google’s search functions so that when consumers search for a particular key word, the site will return “text ads with a symbol or icon designating advertisers that accept GBuy payments.”

Whereas shoppers would currently click on an ad linked to a given merchant’s website, once GBuy is live, the user will be directed through a different checkout process if they select GBuy for the transaction.

The Journal states that Google plans to charge merchants a commission rate of 2.2-percent on sales, plus 30 cents per transaction, but the company will give discount pricing to merchants who also participate in the Google AdWords program. According to the anonymous sources cited by the Journal, such merchants “could get the cost of payment processing through Google dropped to nothing.”

Although the details of GBuy are still sketchy and the Journal stated that even the sparse details announced thus far could change before Google’s official GBuy announcement is made, some critics are already warning of monopolistic behavior on Google’s part.

“Google’s incentives-based launch of its GBuy online payments system is designed, in one fell swoop, to gain and retain more AdWords customers, to set-up GBuy as the go-to default, and perhaps exclusive, online merchant ‘checkout process,’ to undercut eBay and Amazon.com, to usurp online consumers and to data mine consumer buying behavior,” wrote Donna Bogatin in her ZDNet blog.