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Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#21

Post by swombat »

auxbuss wrote: post #20
swombat wrote: post #17

In the UK, I've happily used SecureTrading. They provide great customer service. I wrote an ActiveMerchant plugin for them too: https://github.com/swombat/active_merchant

Hard to evaluate, though, as they don't publish any pricing. Not that I could find. Suspicious minds might conclude: What have you got to hide? Also, it's disingenuous to claim rates lower than the competition without publishing them.

We said we came from Protx (which we did) and got matched pricing, i.e. a low fee per month up until 250 transactions., then 10p per transaction.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#22

Post by madaxe »

Basically, any "serious" PSP is going to want a stack of information from you before you can start trading. PayPal shut down and suspend accounts on a regular basis because they basically only fraud screen you after you're up and running, which is why their barrier to entry is so low, and why they're such a wretched hive of villany and scum.

SagePay do have some kind of deal where they do the whole merchant account bit for you, but will require a fair bit of info before they'll let you trade.

Other good ones in the UK, however : Commidea, SecureTrading, Ogone, GlobalCollect, ServeBase, and Paypoint.net. Out of all of them, I'd recommend Paypoint, Sagepay, and Commidea on a par - basically, pick whichever fits your pricing model - all three have nice XML APIs, Commidea is kinda "enterprisey", but very competent, and Sagepay falls on its ass at least once a week (they had a 5 hour outage last week, which caused merry hell over here).

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#24

Post by noodle »

jasonkester wrote: post #18
StavrosK wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem is their high fees ($75/mo minimum, $35/mo fee, 2.29% + $0.30 per transaction). They're an absolute killer if you want to accept micropayments of EDIT: They aren't even available outside the US :/

$100/month is not a lot of money. If you're a business, and you want to process credit cards, that's what it will cost you. A good definition of "hobby" is anything where a $100/month expense eats into your profits in a meaningful way. You're right about micropayments though. Apart from AWS, I don't know of anybody who offers a good way to do them.

1) you can get it done with paypal and not have $100/mo in fees.

2) paying $100/mo but making less than $100/mo violates the principles of bootstrapping.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#25

Post by jasonkester »

noodle wrote: post #24
jasonkester wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/month is not a lot of money. If you're a business, and you want to process credit cards, that's what it will cost you. A good definition of "hobby" is anything where a $100/month expense eats into your profits in a meaningful way. You're right about micropayments though. Apart from AWS, I don't know of anybody who offers a good way to do them.

1) you can get it done with paypal and not have $100/mo in fees. 2) paying $100/mo but making less than $100/mo violates the principles of bootstrapping.

To clarify, Paypal is fine for hobby projects, where you don't mind sacrificing a bit of professionalism for a cheap and easy payment solution. And where it's not the end of the world if they freeze your account.

You can survive in that mode while your hobby transitions into something that brings in a few hundred dollars a month and pays for your beer.

But once you graduate to a real business, you need to get a real payment processor. It's not a step you can skip, and it will cost you $100/month.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#27

Post by noodle »

jasonkester wrote: post #25
noodle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) you can get it done with paypal and not have $100/mo in fees. 2) paying $100/mo but making less than $100/mo violates the principles of bootstrapping.

To clarify, Paypal is fine for hobby projects, where you don't mind sacrificing a bit of professionalism for a cheap and easy payment solution. And where it's not the end of the world if they freeze your account. You can survive in that mode while your hobby transitions into something that brings in a few hundred dollars a month and pays for your beer. But once you graduate to a real business, you need to get a real…

i don't disagree, i'm just pointing out that the space between $0 revenue and a few hundred bucks doesn't have a better solution.

everyone has to start somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#29

Post by evaldas_a »

maccman wrote: post #9
frisco wrote: post #5

Braintree: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ Libraries out of the box for Ruby, Python, PHP, .NET, and Java: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/gateway

Another +1 for Braintree, they've been excellent.

We had another problem with braintree - due to some error on their side, they have submitted all of our AMEX transactions for settling twice. It took a lot of phone calls to convince them that the problem was on their end, and after they "fixed" it, it happened again during the next billing cycle. They fixed it for good after it and we had no problems since then, but for a while there I was seriously considering ditching them for good. However, at the end of the day, they are still way better than PayPal - we had the common issue of having our account frozen...

Re: Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

#30

Post by StavrosK »

compumike wrote: post #14

PayPal can now do the pre-authorization thing under their Adaptive Payments API (see https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1419 ). We did exactly what you're talking about (one-time preapproval, and then either charge or cancel after a few days) for a project earlier this year. You do have to explicitly apply to PayPal for access to these advanced APIs, but we found that process to be quick and painless. The API is relatively c…

Thank you, that seems to be the best solution so far.
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