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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

#71

Post by Xylakant »

bad_user wrote: post #57
omd wrote: post #45

Going by the title of this post I was hoping it would give a solution to the segmented payment market here in Europe, but it doesn't. A more fitting title would've been "Taking payments in the UK" or Taking credit card payments in Europe". The main problem we have here is that debit cards are a preferred payment method and each country has it's own system. From my experience and other reports I've seen up to 30% of t…

Could you explain a little bit more about what's the problem with debit cards in Europe? I have a MasterCard debit card with which I never, ever had problems making payments and I have made such payments, either direct or through PayPal, Google Wallet or iTunes. Before this I had a Visa debit card issued by the same bank (Groupe Société Générale). Before this I had another debit card issued by another bank. All of th…

A mastercard debit card works much like a credit card. In germany for example, your standard "debit card" is your banks card and in online transactions, you just enter bank account and the banks identifier. It's a legacy way of paying that dates back to the eurocheques. It's comparable to the Card Bleue in France which is a system that exists pretty much in France only. This fragments the market.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#72

Post by samwillis »

buro9 wrote: post #64
jamesjgill wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been getting "soons" since November. I asked only a few days ago how soon is soon, to which no-one will actually answer. But the Stripe guy did say that he agreed that we shouldn't wait... go implement something else, and then they will help people move to them post-launch. So don't not launch something in the UK because you're waiting for Stripe. Launch with GoCardless, launch with PayMill, hell... launch with…

That's exactly what I did, I launched in December with PayPal. Moving to Stripe as soon as they launch, although I am now tempted to keep PayPal as a payment option for people who feel more comfortable using it. I will be an interesting experiment to see if anyone would still use it.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#73

Post by mattmanser »

estel wrote: post #50
biaxident wrote: post #37

Does anyone have any experience with the user experience side of GoCardless? Do customers have any issues entering their account number and sort code, rather than the usual card information? I really like GoCardless but feel that customers might be hesitant to enter that information, especially when they're not used to doing it.

That was definitely one of the concerns that we had when we decided not to implement GoCardless last year for a product. Paying by direct debit is such an unusual process online outside of Paypal and magazine subscriptions, that it's easy to imagine conversions will suffer.

Did you test any of this, or is that just your gut speaking?

Some people have funny ideas about how DD works, not realizing it's extremely consumer friendly and much smaller fees than credit cards.

I was thinking of offering both as my brief play with GoCardless was very easy to implement.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#74

Post by stevoski »

Every time I see an article along these lines, I can't figure out why software startups don't just use a third-party payment processor like FastSpring or Avangate. It makes all these complications go away.

Outsource anything you can, especially the things that others can do much better than you because it is their core business. Payment processing is definitely one of those things.

I started my software company in Germany and have always used a third-party payment processor.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#76

Post by jahewson »

rytis wrote: post #61
return0 wrote: post #51

Unfortunately PayPal is pretty much an unregulated bank and there are a number of horror stories about them closing accounts, freezing funds and making life very difficult for entrepreneurs. Actually, in Europe, paypal IS a registered, regulated bank in Luxembourg. That, to me, makes it more credible.

So what does that mean in practice?

They pay very little tax

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#77

Post by Loic »

Please note that a lot of the difficulties with respect to taking payment for the OP are coming from two things:

- market place for alcohol;

- high value of the items exchanged, in thousands of £.

Everywhere in the world, this would flag a business as dangerous.

If you have a simple webservice offer and if you are banking with Barclays, you can get a merchant account with BarclayCard nearly "over the phone". They take a bit of money, have a 45 day retention period per default, but at the end, they are efficient with a reasonably easy to implement interaction API (if you take the hosted payment page).

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#78

Post by Silhouette »

Xylakant wrote: post #67
Silhouette wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, VAT, how I hate you so! You'd think if the tax authorities were going to saddle us all with worrying about other countries' VAT rules, they could at least provide a list of the ISO country codes and applicable tax rates we need to charge in a format that could easily be imported into a database. Some sort of simple automatic notification system for when the rules change would be useful too. At least that way, eve…

The problem is that the VAT you need to charge does not only depend on where you're located and where your business partner is located, but also on the goods/services provided and on wether the partner is a business or a person and maybe even the moon phase and the current water level of the north sea. You can't just create a lookup table, you have to implement the actual rules.

You can't just create a lookup table, you have to implement the actual rules.

In general, that may be true, though certainly in some cases a look-up table seems to be sufficient. Even in more complicated cases you still typically need the same information about tax rates to start with, you just need a bunch more business logic on top.

In any case, if the tax authorities who are experts on the rules can't find a way to codify and explain them to small businesses, surely it's self-evident that the rules are too complicated for non-expert small businesses to work with and should be replaced with something fit for purpose?

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#79

Post by mmaunder »

I don't get it. Just call MerchantWarehouse (sp?) and get them to hook you up with a merchant account and an authorize.net gateway. We take payments from all over the world using them and get dinged around 3% total with very few chargebacks. It's really not that big a deal.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#80

Post by zimbatm »

One big missing pain: EU VAT taxes.

According to the law you're supposed to tax EU customers if your business is in the EU. Obviously the tax is different for each country and changes from year to year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_of_Europe . Businesses with a VAT ID can be exempted from the tax but only if they provide a valid VAT ID. At the end of the year your business then provides the list of transactions and VAT IDs to your state with the tax form and the state takes care of forwarding the taxes to the other countries.

According to the law you're supposed to check the validity of that VAT ID and because the data changes over time they provide an "API": http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/faqvies.do That API forwards the query to country-specific databases and these databases go down. From their FAQ: "Some parts of the system may be unavailable at certain times due to the necessity to back-up the Member States' databases." Year right.. From my 1 month experience I've already seen two outages, one of them lasting a full day. And I'm not actively monitoring the service.

I've also had customers from Spain and Germany ask for their VAT ID to appear on their billing recipes, because of regulations again. It shouldn't be a biggie but Chargify doesn't support that field so I have to ask customers to use their Billing Address 2 field instead as a hack.

These are still things that I haven't figured out yet:

What happens if you provide invalid VAT IDs in your tax form ? I don't want to loose conversion because a state-owned service on which I have no control doesn't work properly.

I've read in multiple places that if the customer is in your business' country the rules are again different but I have no idea how.

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