For some of their business products, you do actually have to get pre-approval. For example, I filled out approximately ~10 questions (about a page worth of text, about business model, business history, shipping/refund policies, anticipate monthly revenue, etc) to get Appointment Reminder the payments gateway to charge credit cards offsite. I got asked to call in with some elaboration. It went something like:
"So this business hasn't actually sold any software yet?"
"That's correct, we're anticipating opening to the public next week."
"And you charge people monthly for the software? That's after they actually get the software, right?" [+]
"Yes. The software is already written and we are capable of fulfilling immediately, we just haven't opened to the public yet."
"That's great Mr. McKenzie. You're going to be approved, and will get an email when the account is ready."
(We use Stripe these days for AR and substantially all of our other CC payments. Stripe asked very similar questions prior to provisioning the account, but didn't require a phone call or elaboration.)
[+ If you ever get asked a question phrased this way by someone not in the software industry you should probably not respond by saying "Hmm, technically they don't 'get' anything, well OK technically they GET lots of things, but the software is actually physically only on our servers and provided to them on a software as a service model, which means..." When people not in the software industry talk about downloading Gmail just smile and nod -- you don't understand their job, either.]
If you ever get asked a question phrased this way by someone not in the software industry you should probably not respond by saying "Hmm, technically they don't 'get' anything, well OK technically they GET lots of things, but the software is actually physically only on our servers and provided to them on a software as a service model, which means..." When people not in the software industry talk about downloading Gmail just smile and nod -- you don't understand their job, either
Ummm, maybe. I understand that you are paraphrasing and the actual conversation was probably more definitive, but the question as you phrased it may have actually been, "So if you go out of business the people will still actually have what they bought, right? We're not going to get a lot of angry customers wanting charge-backs...."
I've done two accounts with Braintree now, and both times have had very similar conversations with people there. They were fairly painless, but they did want all the documentation that you mentioned as well as assurances that we were not pre-selling anything.
Sounds like those are fairly typical unwritten rules for all payment processors. Which makes sense to me.
"So this business hasn't actually sold any software yet?"
"That's correct, we're anticipating opening to the public next week."
"And you charge people monthly for the software? That's after they actually get the software, right?" [+]
"Yes. The software is already written and we are capable of fulfilling immediately, we just haven't opened to the public yet."
"That's great Mr. McKenzie. You're going to be approved, and will get an email when the account is ready."
(We use Stripe these days for AR and substantially all of our other CC payments. Stripe asked very similar questions prior to provisioning the account, but didn't require a phone call or elaboration.)
[+ If you ever get asked a question phrased this way by someone not in the software industry you should probably not respond by saying "Hmm, technically they don't 'get' anything, well OK technically they GET lots of things, but the software is actually physically only on our servers and provided to them on a software as a service model, which means..." When people not in the software industry talk about downloading Gmail just smile and nod -- you don't understand their job, either.]