Do you need a merchant account?
Do you need an authorize.net or similar account?
Do they handle subscriptions?
What are their rates like?
When do they expect to be available outside the US?
Need to process payments?
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Need to process payments?
#32I don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card processing online a commodity and using the least expensive solution the way to go?
At low volume, PayPal Payments Pro is as good as anything I've found, and it is cheaper than almost every other merchant services provider (especially by the time you factor in the gateway fees). But, it's definitely not cheap. I ache every time I see how much of our revenue is going to PayPal, even if it's better than the prior provider we were using. Our prior merchant services provider had cranked up rates gradually from the time we signed up, and always found reasons to charge us the highest tier of pricing (higher risk transactions got the higher rate, and it seemed like 90% of our orders qualified as "high risk" according to their metrics, even though at the time we were only dealing with about one chargeback per month). When we signed up a few years ago it was dramatically cheaper than PayPal, but by the time we switched it was almost a couple of points more expensive.
But PayPal is also not particularly great. The UI is agonizingly slow (I can only imagine how painful it would be to use if we were doing thousands or millions of transactions per month instead of hundreds). Their response time on payment processing is also slow...slow enough to confuse our shop sometimes.
The good things about PayPal are its better fraud management tools (which you have to pay extra for), its pervasive support in shopping carts (though Payments Pro is a little more rare), and its really comprehensive online interface. I used to have to send faxes for everything with the old processor, which was just ridiculous. I can do anything online with PayPal.
I also love that PayPal does everything. I hated never even knowing who to call when we had problems with the old service. There were three web interfaces for three different companies (Authorize.net, merchant services bank, and some sort of reporting service that I never could figure out) that did god knows what, and we were being billed by all of them. All of them had different points of contact and different procedures for dealing with issues (and issues pretty much never got dealt with), and I never, in years of dealing with them, figured out who was responsible for what. PayPal is the gateway, the merchant services provider, and everything else. When I'm confused about something, or need to issue a refund or whatever, I login to one place and all the data is there.
I also haven't been able to figure out how to use recurring payments at PayPal. But, that's probably a failing on my part. I'm kinda dumb sometimes, when accounting and money and such comes up.
But, I definitely don't think PayPal is the last word in payment processing. If there were something better, faster, or cheaper, I'd happily switch (any one of those three things would do it, assuming it's equal on the others).
It's a really hard market to tackle, since so much of it is regulatory compliance (both private and government regulations) and interacting with really old-fashioned industries (banks modernized about 30 years ago, and seemingly decided that was a one-time expense that they never needed to do again).
Re: Need to process payments?
#33I don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card processing online a commodity and using the least expensive solution the way to go?
The least expensive solution is not always the best. I formerly used Paypal exclusively, now I lose out on some work because I refuse to use it. They can lock your account at any time for any reason. It's nearly impossible to get support and it doesn't matter. Paypal is easy to game in that a buyer can use a credit card, and initiate a charge-back. Paypal sides with a charge-back 100% of the time that you can't prove shipment which of course is impossible with digital goods. I've had my account locked down for 6 months in the past for attempting to use some of my funds to buy actual physical gold as an investment. No fraud anywhere, but they decided that's money laundering. I am happy to see a new start-up come through and try and change something because Paypal is broken.
Re: Need to process payments?
#34I don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card processing online a commodity and using the least expensive solution the way to go?
Perhaps it's just a question of scale, and maybe I'm trying to solve problems that don't really exist. I'm hesitent to use paypal because when I _DO_ move to something more legit (ala Braintree or Authorize.net), I have to re-bill all of my customers and they have to put in their CC info again. This doesn't seem ideal to me.
We moved from Authorize.net to PayPal Web Payments Pro. Much happier now.
Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
Re: Need to process payments?
#35I just sent them an e-mail. I'm hoping this is a payment gateway :D Have a call with Braintree, but they require monthly minimums and a setup fee. If there was a scalable solution as follows, I'd jump onboard immediately: -Create an account (Free) -Start accepting payments at a slightly higher percent (3.5%?) -Percentage goes down as volume increases End the negotiation, setup fees, etc that are stuck in this archaic…
The big turn off for me with Braintree was the ridiculous application requirements. You could imigrate into the US five times and provide less documentation. I know why they ask for that info (to cover their asses), but it was enough for me to avoid them. A really simple (and fast!) application process could be a very big selling point. People are impulsive, and when evaluating processors I'd probably go for the easi…
People are impulsive, but businesses aren't. If you're some guy wanting to start transaction, you might need a smaller solution. For businesses, I think they want a big set up process because it makes the managers feel safer.
Re: Need to process payments?
#36I don't know what this startup is, but one option for startups to get started with payments is http://chargify.com , their api is pretty solid and they are good with support and are focused recurring payment processing. Only issue is you still need a payment gateway such as Braintree, Authorize.NET, etc.
The payment gateway is still the bottleneck. Call it the only piece in the value chain that hasn't been 'modernized.'
Merchant services is even more old-fashioned than the gateways, as far as I can tell.
Re: Need to process payments?
#37I am not US based but still need a decent payment processing system. All existing payment processing companies are US-centric. Any luck for us?
Actually... since these guys are YC - I offer my .02Cents.
There are a number of us in this exact situation and it is a GIANT pain point. This market is basically untapped... if you can/want to tackle non-US payment processing, you will make a killing.
Re: Need to process payments?
#38I am not US based but still need a decent payment processing system. All existing payment processing companies are US-centric. Any luck for us?
I'm sure they will expand internationally as quickly as they can, because the founders themselves are from Europe.
How are they doing things differently from a merchant account perspective?
We just finished setting up a merchant account for one of our products and that process is a huge productivity bottleneck. There are a number of solutions out there today for startups who want to process payments (chargify comes to mind) but they all pretty much have the same problem - having to deal with a merchant account setup. If that takes weeks, the setup takes weeks too, even if the new gateway needs only a few minutes to get you started on their end.
Re: Need to process payments?
#39Can we get some more information? What are they doing better? What kind of fee structure are they selling? Also, one big concern in my startup is chargebacks. Does this service help me with chargeback protection at all? More generally: how will they make my life better?
Have you actually gotten a lot of chargebacks? I've heard that the industry significantly exaggerates the amount of chargebacks that actually occur.
Re: Need to process payments?
#40I just sent them an e-mail. I'm hoping this is a payment gateway :D Have a call with Braintree, but they require monthly minimums and a setup fee. If there was a scalable solution as follows, I'd jump onboard immediately: -Create an account (Free) -Start accepting payments at a slightly higher percent (3.5%?) -Percentage goes down as volume increases End the negotiation, setup fees, etc that are stuck in this archaic…
The big turn off for me with Braintree was the ridiculous application requirements. You could imigrate into the US five times and provide less documentation. I know why they ask for that info (to cover their asses), but it was enough for me to avoid them. A really simple (and fast!) application process could be a very big selling point. People are impulsive, and when evaluating processors I'd probably go for the easi…
For application requirements, we (Braintree) work with Visa, MasterCard and the sponsoring banks to make sure that all our merchants are in compliance. There are other payment providers that will turn a blind eye to these requirements in addition to postponing proper due diligence and underwriting until it's a problem for a merchant. We regularly have merchants approach us that are in some sort of bind (e.g. violation of card association rules, account was frozen / shut down) because their previous payments provider didn't do things correctly. The payments industry is very complex with a lot of layers and nuances. We try our best to do things right even if it means more upfront effort.
An example: "With increased revenue, the merchant bank became concerned with the increase in liability. So, the bank closed the merchant account." And because they couldn't get their credit card data back, they had to ask all their customers to enter their payment information again. http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/credit-card-portability/
Additional Info:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...
http://whiteelephantmedia.com/
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/paypal-reserve...