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Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

jamesmaskell.co.uk

11–20 of 182 posts

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#11
post #2

Anybody used Paymill yet? Their docs all look fairly straightforward, and I'm strongly considering them for a project, but I'm interested in the experience of others.

We began to look at them, unfortunately while the API was straight forward the documentation was simply wrong in many places and contradictory which was a tad frustrating. The biggest issue for us was they simply couldn't answer even the most basic question like their current PCI-DSS status, information about their network or datacentre setup (or even where it was hosted) in effect we couldn't complete any PCI-DSS assessment docs. Needless to say, we simply did not feel confident handing over our companies account and other details they were asking to go live with. Let alone let them handle our payments. This was a few months ago, and they were having teething issues which may have now been resolved I suspect given how common such questions should be they now have the answers in place we may well relook at them in a couple of years time if they are still in the marketplace.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#12
post #8

I'm in talks with one of the others on that list because I need Amex support.. but in the UK PayPal also do a tier called "Website Payments Pro". It's not the same as a vanilla PayPal account and includes a merchant account and API for doing card transactions. You have to go through screening to be accepted and I've found them to be very professional and helpful (as in, a far better service than the vanilla PayPal se…

Who is using Amex? Corporates?

rich people

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#13
post #8

I'm in talks with one of the others on that list because I need Amex support.. but in the UK PayPal also do a tier called "Website Payments Pro". It's not the same as a vanilla PayPal account and includes a merchant account and API for doing card transactions. You have to go through screening to be accepted and I've found them to be very professional and helpful (as in, a far better service than the vanilla PayPal se…

Who is using Amex? Corporates?

I think that's a big part of it, particularly if you're trying for the procurement "loophole" which allows low to mid level employees to authorise spend of up to a certain level without going full a full blown procurement cycle.

A lot of the big firms (in the UK at least) will use Corporate AMEX charge cards (rather than credit cards) for this purpose. If they can't pay on their Corporate AMEX they'll often have to go through a more drawn out process to get the payment made by some other method unless they want to make it on a personal card and then claim it back.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#14
We recently switched to Braintree from PayPal Payments Pro. While we're not "small," (>£10million/year) the process was largely painless and I can't recommend them enough. We also needed to take AMEX cards and found setting that account up extremely easy (though we already had an AMEX account).

The only thing that does seem slightly annoying is all their support and accounts people are in Chicago, meaning the inevitable back-and-forth can drag on for way longer than it should for merchants based in Europe. Hopefully this is something they will get ironed out once they have some significant traction in the EU.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#15
post #3

Interesting article. We are using Paymill and it's very easy to use (official extensions for Magento and other eCommerce systems). Our old payment provider was a pain to work with (uploading excel tables to process the payments...).

Does the official extension do everything you require? We have actually just released a magento extension for Stripe and were looking at porting it over to Paymill but after some research figured out they had an official open source once so we are trying to determine if it's still going to be worth the time investment.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#16

We recently switched to Braintree from PayPal Payments Pro. While we're not "small," (>£10million/year) the process was largely painless and I can't recommend them enough. We also needed to take AMEX cards and found setting that account up extremely easy (though we already had an AMEX account). The only thing that does seem slightly annoying is all their support and accounts people are in Chicago, meaning the inevita…

That's one thing I like about Paymill, from an initial impression. They're in Germany, so I'm in the same timezone. I just had a small email exchange today and it was nice knowing they could response so quickly.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#18

I can't wait for Stripe to get over here - fingers crossed this will happen soon. And from what I'm hearing, it may not be too far off. We've integrated with Recurly (with Sagepay as our gateway) for our recurring subscriptions at GoSquared, but the experience has been one I would hate to endure again. Thanks for sharing your experience James!

What are you hearing that suggests Stripe may not be too far off?

I'll soon be in the process of adding payment options to a new UK-based startup and really really really want to believe that Stripe will be an option for me in time.

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