121–130 of 185 posts
There was a post here recently trying to figure out why Europe's startup scene was falling behind the US. Kudos to companies that can survive past monstrosities like VAT and VATMOSS. Out of curiosity, how is VAT enforced for a non-EU seller and an EU buyer? Let's say my business was registered in the Cayman islands for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the obligation to pay customers' VAT goes back way before VATMOSS. Yep, VOES was put in place in 2003 and that was a simplification, before that businesses were supposed to register themselves with each country's tax office and fill VAT everywhere. For non-EU businesses VATMOSS mostly updates the scheme: register yourself in any member state and use their MOSS portal as a non-EU business, the tax office is…
A business outside the EU has no obligation to do anything , unless it makes itself subject to EU jurisdiction. Just as you don't have to collect US state sales taxes for any US state unless your company has a legal presence in that state. That doesn't help you if you're in an EU country, of course.
If $6 is too cheap and encourages fraudsters to test credit cards on your service because banks don't get concerned about transactions at that cost, how much should he have charged at a minimum? $10 $20?
A good way to counter testers is to add a delay to charging the card.
> it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility. Not sure if it's standard practice, but in our case we let the users use the "free tier" service first , and we offer the paid plans only once we can validate they have a genuine interest in the product . It works well for us to avoid these cases.
The shitheads who are testing stolen cards will probably skip the free tier so they can, ahem, test their stolen cards.
This should suffice. I don't think they'll wait 2 weeks for the charge to go through.
You can automate the process of disabling charges to if nothing happens. Say 2 days before the charge is about to happen, you do an automated audit of the account and if there hasn't been any activity, fire off an email stating that their trial is about to expire and they're about to get charged and you noticed they hadn't used the service yet. If still no activity when you're about to charge, then cancel charge and disable account and chalk it up as avoiding a chargeback. Make sure to email the user saying that you disabled the pro features and voided the charge as to not automatically charge them for something they're not using.
It's a win/win situation. If the customer was legit, you just saved them on paying for something they didn't plan on using, and they may actually re-enable it and start using the account because they see you actually care about them as a customer and aren't just hoping they forget about such a small charge and it goes on for years before they audit their card charges and cancel any small things.
If it's a user who was just testing stolen cards, well 2 weeks is a long time to gamble on if it's valid or not, so they move on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A business outside the EU has no obligation to do anything , unless it makes itself subject to EU jurisdiction. Just as you don't have to collect US state sales taxes for any US state unless your company has a legal presence in that state. That doesn't help you if you're in an EU country, of course.
I have a complex notice written entirely in Spanish that I can't understand, but which with the help of Google translate I have decoded to indicate that some 100 odd euros is being withheld from me as the customer paid for my services and has voluntarily paid some kind of tax on my behalf. I am sure with sufficient effort I can probably find a way to get that 100 euros refunded, but boy, it sure aint worth my time. B…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, "Verified by Visa" is exactly like phishing. Good paper. Fortunately here in the USA I haven't been asked for my credentials in at least 10 years. So it seems to have died the death it so richly deserved. Do people encounter this on a daily basis?
Visa and co. are big—really big—so I've never understood why they've not just leaned on the OS manufacturers and browser makers to provide them some form of unique, unforgeable signal to users that they're interacting with a real bank. There could be, say, an HTML5-exposed API capable of triggering "super-modal" forms (like OS UAC does) if-and-only-if the page is being served from a secure origin cross-signed by some…
Unfortunately the banks have less motivation to invest in this as long as the costs of fraud are pushed onto merchants and all of the major players charge similar fees. If something like Apple Pay starts to catch on, perhaps we'll see that change once the banks’ main concern is avoiding a single vendor getting too much market share.
> it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility. Not sure if it's standard practice, but in our case we let the users use the "free tier" service first , and we offer the paid plans only once we can validate they have a genuine interest in the product . It works well for us to avoid these cases.
Regarding his fraud issue, I found that my website was being used in the same way when I added a credit card payment form. I implemented a system that first does an "Auth". If that passes, then I pass details to MaxMind and get back a response with a "riskScore". If the score is too high, I void the auth and decline the transaction. This has saved me a lot of chargeback fees, though it's still not perfect. I prefer P…
Please, please, anyone, if you are getting started in online payment processing, don't do it yourself. Use a service that already handles the VAT and fraud detection issues. Then, when you've proven your product, and got substantial sales, you can write your own. Maybe. The author of the article spent weeks and thousands of euros to implement a payment system. And yet he had only a handful of customers.
Well, he used Stripe, so he didn't write his own. Personally I wasn't aware that there was such a high fee for a chargeback. Is that because Stripe doesn't handle fraud well? Seems like most of his time was spent dealing with tax issues, which you'd have to do regardless of how money is actually transferred.