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Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

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Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#51

Post by danmaz74 »

rmoriz wrote: post #35
runako wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time there's a post on HN about a new business that's the new hotness but which is not available outside the US, there are a bunch of posts asking why. Here are some possible answers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027066 Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the ne…

Rules of Business: If there is a market in Europe, some european copy cat will fill the gap if the US based company is too slow.

Addendum: And then very likely the most successful European copycats will get acquired by a the same US company when it really wants to expand abroad...

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#52

Post by pconf »

kristofferR wrote: post #25

I let my customers chose between PayPal Subscriptions and 2Checkout. Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.

Another problem with Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com is the amount of data they require to charge my card. There's no way they need to know my home address, phone number, email address, etc. I feel sorry for those who will post PII to some sub-merchant website because the seller's devs were too lazy to write something user and privacy -friendly.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#54

Post by chrisfarms »

jot wrote: post #18

We use Chargify with Payment Express hooked up to Barclaycard and American Express merchant services. It works great. We lost $750 of sales (50%) in our first month because we didn't think Amex was important. It turns out that Amex is the card of choice for US businesses.

Same setup as Jot here (Hi jot)...

Had zero trouble with Payment Express (known as Direct Payment Solutions to the UK banks). Only thing that is maybe not ideal is the time difference, Payex. are in New Zealand and so email-threads can take several days if you don't ask questions at 1am.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#55

Post by rickmb »

sborsje wrote: post #41

We're also using Adyen. The support is pretty good, the API/website/documentation/customization options are all terrible. But it's one of the few PSPs that provides support for lots and lots of payment methods (like: VISA, Amex, MC, PayPal, but also a lot of local stuff like iDeal, Mr. Cash, etc.) Supporting a local payment method (iDeal in our case) is a pretty big deal in our case, since it accounts for +50% of our…

Same story here, I can pretty much confirm this word for word.

Especially the broad support of payment methods is crucial, and pretty much makes up for all of Adyen's shortcomings in the implementation department.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#56

Post by ashleyw »

rmoriz wrote: post #30

Use http://recurly.com with http://WireCard.com/ as Gateway. Works fine in the EU! (WireCard AG is a German based credit card gateway owning a "full" bank license. It's also a public traded company regulated by strict German banking regulations)

What's WireCard like price-wise? Doesn't seem to say on their website.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#57

Post by mhd »

ch2500 wrote: post #49
mhd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of lawyers who make money just with that, never mind bankers… Of course there are provisions in place that make it easier for the banks to communicate, as this is in the interest of the banks themselves. That doesn't instantly revoke every odd tax law that came up in each country over the course of a few hundred years of financial history… Yes, it's possible for me to wire money to anyone in Europe, if…

Wiring money to anyone in the EU _is_ easy now. Might not be the case for UK people because they still need to deal with foreign currencies ;)

I can't remember seeing a web shop that does IBAN/SWIFT transfers (apart from one or two small-time ebay sellers). I pay via wire transfer all the time within Germany, but outside it's credit card or paypal (and even the latter quite often requires a credit card transfer for that).

It's not a big deal for corporate / professional deals with largers sums, i.e. a monthly €49 subscription. But if you're running some kind of browser game and want to get one-time €2.99 payments, you'll have to deal with a rather different demographic. Have yet to see an internatinal (at least pan-European) service that provides a good solution for that. Most of the time you have to cobble it together from all different local providers, and a lot of them look quite fishy to me (and that's saying something in that market).

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#58

Post by mhd »

danmaz74 wrote: post #51
rmoriz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rules of Business: If there is a market in Europe, some european copy cat will fill the gap if the US based company is too slow.

Addendum: And then very likely the most successful European copycats will get acquired by a the same US company when it really wants to expand abroad...

If they did something interesting, i.e. are worth acquiring. More likely, they still sit on a month-old feature set of the original and then are sued out of business – or just ignored.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#59

Post by dangrossman »

pconf wrote: post #52
kristofferR wrote: post #25

I let my customers chose between PayPal Subscriptions and 2Checkout. Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.

Another problem with Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com is the amount of data they require to charge my card. There's no way they need to know my home address, phone number, email address, etc. I feel sorry for those who will post PII to some sub-merchant website because the seller's devs were too lazy to write something user and privacy -friendly.

It's not about laziness, it's about fraud. The less you know about your customer the more likely the person on the other end is not who they claim to be, and doesn't have permission to use the credit card they're using. For some sites that's fine, for others taking only a CC#, CVV2 code and zip code (the minimum necessary info to pay a decent transaction rate ) and you'll be out of business in a few months from the chargeback rate.

Once you lose a merchant account for CB rate (consistently above 1%), you'll never get another again, since all banks/MSPs check the TMF and MATCH file and will see you've been terminated in the past. Both your business information and the social security numbers of all principals of the business will be blacklisted for life.

You might be interested in the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days". PayPal is one of the founding stories covered. The only reason PayPal is here, where so many other payment services came and went during the dot-com boom, is that they tackled the fraud problem. There were times when PayPal was bleeding over $10 million a month to fraudulent activity. They are, in effect, the largest payment fraud management company in the world.

Re: Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

#60

Post by dangrossman »

kristofferR wrote: post #25

I let my customers chose between PayPal Subscriptions and 2Checkout. Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.

It's a bit of a stretch to call them "unknown domains" in 2011. PayPal has 232 million accounts in over 190 markets, and anyone that's ever bought something on eBay knows them. People on all my websites have a choice between using a credit card right on the site or checking out through PayPal, and on every one of those sites, they choose PayPal more than 50% of the time.
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