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Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

jamesmaskell.co.uk

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Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#21

Post by jamesjgill »

webignition wrote: post #18
jamesjgill wrote: post #9

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.

I wasn't expecting this response, as I had heard from other sources previously that their best bet for UK / European expansion would be to buy out someone else, but I can't really argue with this: https://twitter.com/cjc/status/292350613939953666

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#23

Post by jusben1369 »

SpreedlyCore is another path to go down. It's a cloud based credit card vault that connects to 40+ payment gateways with a good API and docs. We have PayPal Pro customers who use PayPal for processing but develop against our API. We support GoCardless as well. Due to the fact we vault your cards away from the gateway you can change or add a gateway at anytime. I work for Spreedly who is behind SpreedlyCore.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#24

Post by mootothemax »

Not to forget the other half of the story: issuing invoices.

In Europe this can quickly become a pain, not only due to the extra information you need to collect (names, addresses and so on) but especially if you also need to collect Value Added Tax (VAT). This means asking for VAT IDs for companies - if they have them - and then calculating the tax based on whether the customer is in the same country as you or not. The complexity can rapidly descend into madness.

I have the added fun of having to issue bilingual invoices written in both Polish and English. Well, they could be only in Polish, but then the majority of people wouldn't understand them.

In the end, I bought a ready-made solution (http://nbill.co.uk/) which, whilst not being one of the most intuitive pieces of software I've ever used, gets the job done.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#25

Post by timnash »

nodata wrote: post #8
petercooper wrote: post #6

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?

Where possible I will use AMEX for all my personal transactions mainly as I have a longer interest free period on spends making budgeting easier, also while its a pure perception thing the few times I have had the need for a chargeback or had a problem with my card its been resolved in minutes.

Of course as a merchant it's higher fees, has weird conditions attached to it and virtually all AMEX users have another credit card (indeed Amex provide me with a visa card for when I can't use my amex) so there is little benefit to supporting amex.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#26

Post by dewey »

nulluk wrote: post #15
dewey wrote: 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.

Yes, we are just running a small store though so I don't really have a lot of special requirements.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#29

Post by jusben1369 »

obeattie wrote: post #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 inevita…

Did PayPal give you back or help you transfer over your stored customer credit cards?

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#30

Post by obeattie »

jusben1369 wrote: post #29
obeattie wrote: post #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 inevita…

Did PayPal give you back or help you transfer over your stored customer credit cards?

Nope. We operate primarily on a recurring subscription basis, so we're just having to maintain backwards-compatibility for those customers currently on PayPal.

To be honest, PayPal could not have been less helpful at any step of the process, both before we were wanting to switch and during the process. They're a total nightmare of a company to deal with.

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