SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Levi Strauss & Co.'s main Web site has quietly stopped offering Google Inc.'s Checkout online payment feature, marking yet another hiccup for the new Google feature introduced in late June.

The San Francisco-based clothier hasn't completely abandoned Checkout. It's still available on the Web site for Dockers, one of the company's other properties.

But the decision to yank Checkout from www.levi.com raises more questions about how well Checkout works, and whether it's resonating with merchants. The answers to these questions are key to whether Checkout can emerge as a serious competitor to eBay Inc.'s EBAY, -2.17% ubiquitous PayPal online payment feature.

"Payments is a hard thing to do," said Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for eBay's PayPal division. "We've been doing it for eight years and have 5,000 people working on it."

The Checkout feature was pulled from www.levi.com just a few days after Levi Strauss & Co. encountered a "particular issue" with it, said Steve Davis, senior vice president of partners for GSI Commerce, Inc., the King of Prussia, Penn.-based firm that Levi Strauss & Co. used to integrate Checkout.

To date, Levi Strauss & Co. has yet to commit to re-introducing Checkout to levi.com. But "we're confident (they) will revisit it," Davis said.

Davis said GSI's relationship with Levi Strauss & Co. precludes him from providing additional details.

It's likely the firm will revisit Checkout after Google releases an updated version of feature, due out in the next few weeks.

The update addresses concerns merchants have raised about how Checkout orders are sometimes delayed for days by an overly-cautious procedure for rooting out fraud, according to some update details revealed on a Web site Google provides for Google Checkout merchants.

Levi Strauss & Co.'s decision is the latest in a series of issues Google's GOOG, +0.12% had to deal with since it introduced Checkout.

For example, there are a growing number of consumer complaints about delays in how long Checkout takes to process orders.

Also, on July 6, eBay announced that Checkout didn't meet certain of its criteria. As a result, Checkout wasn't approved for use as an eBay payment option.

The more recent Levi.com development is particularly stinging.

The San Francisco-based clothier was among the highest profile of the original 100 partners that signed up to use Checkout, which was launched amid much fanfare, and was heralded as the next great competitor to PayPal

Representatives for Google and Levi Strauss & Co. didn't comment for this story about the decision by the clothier to remove Checkout.

As to the complaints surfacing about delays due to fraud screening, a Google spokeswoman said there are brief delays for just a small percentage of transactions, and "for a majority of our transactions, there is little impact."