Hopefully they'll be able to afford a webdesigner.
Their site would neither tell me if they're available in my country nor could I find any pricing information whatsoever. Instead I was left with motion sickness due to all the flickering and bouncing...
All thanks goes to ontestpad.com owners, I'm just re-posting the article which popped in google search when I was thinking about writing such an overview.
As the most discussions here on HN focus on moving away from PayPal, but don't offer options for UK/EU based companies - this blog post provides good overview what's available.
Fastspring is available in all EU countries, I think, but Amazon FPS is available only in the UK. Not in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, I think. Paypal Business Payments? UK Yes, rest of europe? Nope. Basically, for the table to be useful to people from the EU it would have to have a column for every EU country.
Also, the PCI compliance part is not very accurate. You can get PCI compliance by simply paying some certification company and filling out a self-assessment document. Techies always think that because PCI is about safety of credit card data in order to qualify you have to prove that you act responsibly with credit card data. This is not the case. It's strictly a legal matter. You're properly PCI compliant if you meet the arbitrary legal requirements.
Are there actually any modern payment gateways available worldwide that don't suck? I've tried Paypal and Ogone and they both are a serious hassle. How i would loooove stripe or wepay to become available worldwide!
I don't think there are any. In what way was Ogone a serious hassle? Was it difficult to get to the point where you could accept payments? Payments that didn't get processed correctly? Downtime?
Ogone works when you get over the draconic configuration and contact setup with banking instances. From a technical point it works good but please don't get me started on the user experience, that's just one big fail from start to end.
Amazon FPS is usable from the UK but it demands you have a "US-based credit card" to sign up for it so it somewhat defeats the point of being available in the UK since getting a credit card with a US billing address is rather complicated.
Google's system is another waste of time because it demands you bill in your local currency and can't support anything else. Not much use if you're in the UK and have mostly US customers.
Didn't find them when I went looking, that's all. FWIW, FastSpring's checkout is also a redirect, but they give you some pretty flexible control over the markup and CSS so its quite simple to keep the branding consistent.
If you're looking to take regular payments from UK customers, check out gocardless.com. We're based on Direct Debit (bank-to-bank payments), so charges are only 1% per transaction
We're still in closed trial, but happy to give out invitations to HN users
2) Fair point, although this varies a lot by country (consider CC usage in Germany) and is not the case for B2B transactions
3) No it doesn't. There's a pan-European ACH network (SEPA DD), also if you look at PayPal they offer Bank transfer in US & Europe using ACH in a similar way
True, there are limits - but that doesn't mean it's flawed.
1. DD also provides protection. Admittedly not at the same level, but the banks do guarantee the scheme against misuse.
2. Very true - but if only DD is offered as an ongoing payment mechanism then many people will use it.
3. The UK is a perfectly valid market to target - and hosted DD provision is an excellent innovation to offer.
Don't think any of the SaaS billing providers today really suite SMBs in cost wise. Merchant account costs, transaction costs, billing provider costs could easily add up to around 10-20% of each transaction.
FastSpring's price is ALL IN. It includes the merchant account, payment gateway and subscription features, and no setup fees nor monthly charges; just the per-transaction costs as noodle commented.
Plus, sign-up and testing is totally free and still gets awesome customer support; you only start paying them anything when you start selling your service. This struck me as ideal for an SMB in its first year.
Great to hear it worked for you. But in my case if I'm selling 3k per month with $5-10 per user, one option would charge me around $270 and other around $500. Not really good for micro payment based products.
And this isn't about SaaSy. It's same with all services out there.
Just get a merchant account and program it yourself - it's super easy to do. I don't even understand a need for 3rd party recurring billing companies - programming something to charge someone $X amount every X days is pretty dang easy...
+ What happens when someone gets a card declined for an unspecified? Retries? What if the error was fatal? Sends an email? Does it cut their service immediately or after a grace period? If they pay on day 2 of the grace period, do they get 30 days of service or 28?
+ What happens if someone wants to upgrade from the $29 / mo account to the $79 / mo account on the 4th of March if their anniversary date was the 25th of February in a leap year?
+ A bug screwed up Bob's data and we're offering him $125 of credit to say we're-so-sorry. You built that feature, right?
+ Our accountant wants to know "How much have we billed this year?", "How much have we collected this year?", and "How much money have we collected that have we not earned yet?" You built that, right?
+ Foo Corp filed a chargeback against payment #123456. This means we got a callback ping and did something consequential as a result of it, right?
+ Why are you answering these questions when you could be writing code that people actually pay for?
5) select sum(amount) from charges where date='this year'... the other thing is just accounting by dates, up to individual company... easy reporting by date
6) chargeback you get a fax or letter - respond back and keep templates for each case - EASY
7) b/c then you're not paying someone else for a trivial service.
Your time is worth money. There is always going to be a magic number that makes it worthwhile to pay someone to do something than to do it yourself. There is a good chance these recurring billing systems fall under that magic number.
If you're not sure how to work out that magic number, just work out how much it costs you to live for 2 weeks, if this is going to take you 2 weeks to develop, there's your number.
They have ok APIs, although they are e-commerce focused.
They also just got a whopping 155 million dollar investment from DST and earlier investment round is from Sequoia. I'd expect them to open up in new countries soon. http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/12/09/klarna-receives-155-...