There's also a Finnish startup doing online payments in Europe: https://holvi.com/
Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
81–90 of 182 posts
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#82Both Amazon Payments and Google Checkout are now available in the UK, at the same pricing level as PayPal.
The two main complaints levelled at PayPal in TFA are poor customer service and poor technology - two aspects that Amazon have been very good at in my experience.
Does anyone have much experience with these platforms and their use by "normal" UK consumers?
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#83I'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?
In my experience, a lot of people who work in large companies who have authorization to spend decent money do. They can often get hold of a Visa or Mastercard instead but it seems to be more hassle to get authorized by a higher-up.
Personally, I have an Amex too and I'm not rich or special but maybe it's different in the UK. I use it because I get a ton of airmiles and Amex never seems to get rejected or stopped for fraud checking purposes.
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey - one of the founders of GoCardless here. We have found that conversion can be just as good, if not better than cards in the right cases. The biggest factor that affects this is transaction type. We see really great conversion for repeat billing where Direct Debit is already a well known method of payment. Conversion is not as good for one-off payments where DD is less expected though.
I appreciate the honesty and lack of 'spin'. I was considering GoCardless but a survey of my customers stopped me.
We switched from PayPal to GoCardless for one off payments and we haven't found any problems amongst our customer base. We occasionally have to explain the mechanics behind it but generally people get it and prefer it to not having the faff of a PayPal login.
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#85PayEx is large in the Nordic countries (Norway,Sweden,Denmark,Finland) but apparently has some global support as well.
Unfortunatly there's no public word on pricing.
See http://payex.com/business/services/Payment/online.payments
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#86Earlier 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…
Once you've launched with another service, you've already done the integration work, and Stripe's main value proposition seems to be its simple sign-up and integration process.
Once you've launched with another service, you may well be tied to them anyway, if they lock in your subscribers' card data. At best, you're running multiple services in parallel until all your early subscribers quit, or you're asking everyone to resubscribe and surely losing a significant number of people during that process.
And once you've launched with another service, you've permanently accepted their legal terms, which may or may not be a smart thing to do with some of the things these guys hide away in their contracts.
I certainly wouldn't wait for a company that says "soon" forever, but it's also not as simple as just signing up for any alternative you can find and hoping you'll move later. Of course you want to start bringing the money in, but as the saying goes, if you get into bed with the wrong partner for a night, the consequences can still last a lifetime.
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#87Vinetrade has the kind of business model that scares banks and card payment providers. We trade high value goods (prices in the region of £1.5-20k) that are rarely delivered to the buyer (they're stored in remote warehouses).
I love virtually all startups and wish for their success. That said: I'm thinking that when every bank in Creation was saying "We won't take CC payments for that. No, no, you simply can't convince us that is a good idea." they were actually being appropriately conservative about legitimate operation risks uniquely incurred by this business model.
If you don't have a Fraud Guy, I respectfully suggest either hiring or training a Fraud Guy very, very soon, preferably before enabling any form of credit card payment. Your Fraud Guy is going to have some recommendations, including recommendations which meaningfully interfere with the product team's ability to meet user demands. If you do not listen to your Fraud Guy's recommendations (or, regrettably, even if you do), you may eventually get an expensive lesson in why both BigCo and startups in related fields eventually have to hire a/several/an entire department of Fraud Guys.
One of your Fraud Guy's first questions is going to be "Is there any pathway by which I can take a credit card and turn it into cash using this service? If so, what is the timeline on that?" I am not a Fraud Guy, but I count two ways to cash out credit cards, just reading the website FAQs. If you are discovered by the adversaries to be the weakest link in the UK financial system with regards to cash outs, you can expect heavy, dedicated adversarial interest.
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#88One 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 transac…
As far as I understand it, you can check and are expected to observe and note anything odd about transactions with supplied VAT numbers but AFAIK - and I'm not a lawyer! - there's no law that you must check every one. (Note: This may be a UK specific interpretation.)
However, if they turn out to be false and the tax man comes back to you, you could be liable for the VAT. Depending on your sales profile, you might consider this an acceptable risk - I certainly do (I get perhaps 10 transactions like that each year).
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is what I'm currently planning on doing for handling monthly (possibly annual) subscriptions.
Do you handle subscriptions and if so do you have any plans for handling moving the subscriptions from PayPal to Stripe?
If I were just to be handling one-off payments I'd not particularly care who I chose to go with (within reason). With subscriptions this gets, I believe, a bit trickier.
Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013
#90Both Amazon Payments and Google Checkout are now available in the UK, at the same pricing level as PayPal. The two main complaints levelled at PayPal in TFA are poor customer service and poor technology - two aspects that Amazon have been very good at in my experience. Does anyone have much experience with these platforms and their use by "normal" UK consumers?
I tried using Google Checkout early in my business and it had a fatal flaw of not letting me sell things in US dollars and British pounds but only British pounds. Since 90% of my business is in the US, it was a non-starter. I have to wonder if they've improved it since, though.