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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

#171

Post by kerneis »

namdnay wrote: post #133
Xylakant wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Carte Bleue system is more or less deprecated/integrated now, AFAIK they can all be treated as Visa cards

You are correct. But they are several reasons why the situation might seem complex for a foreigner.

French people regularly use the term "carte bleue" to mean "debit card" (and most of the debit cards still feature the legacy "carte bleue" logo). Even worse, most of them say "carte de crédit" (credit card) when they really mean "debit card", because credit cards are very uncommon and people don't know the difference. I have no statistics, but from my personal experience, credit cards not linked to a bank account barely exist here.

On the other hand, we have a lot of companies offering short-term, small-amount credits easily — directly on your bank account, without a dedicated credit card. Maybe those play the same role as credit cards in the US?

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#172

Post by mietek »

contingencies wrote: post #170
mietek wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean HSBC Merchant Services? http://www.globalpaymentsinc.com/UK/index.html

Corp people handled it via HSBC bank account. Certainly not via randompaymentrelatedwebsite.com. But yeah, that sounds right!

Yeah, this website does looks random, hence my question, but it's what HSBC points to on their business pages:

http://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/business-banking/business...

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#173

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jusben1369 wrote: post #103
stevoski wrote: post #74

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 Ge…

PayPal, PayMill, Braintree etc are all 3rd party payment processors. So I don't quite understand your distinction. I believe FastSpring may mean you avoid having to get a merchant account directly so perhaps that's the difference you see? The biggest objection I've heard is the 9% flat rate they take vs 3% and 30 cents per transaction that you'd roughly see from a payment processor.

These e-commerce companies will negotiate as long as you have a reasonable revenue.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#174

Post by thisone »

Silhouette wrote: post #54

Agreed, the effort required to collect payments is absurd for a UK start-up today. I haven't added up how much time we've spent just trying to find a good way to let customers pay us, but I'm quite sure we would have launched long ago if we'd had a simple no-brainer option and spent the rest of the time building our service instead! As it is, we've been looking into options for months and nothing is perfect. For us,…

(disclaimer, the last time I had to deal with these things was 11 years ago, in the states. And I don't know what your exact needs are)

I see you didn't directly mention Sage, I've seen a number of sites using Sage Pay for their online billing, and they don't seem to require a merchant account. (though fees are probably higher than others)

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#175

Post by conorgdaly »

jmaskell wrote: post #104
patio11 wrote: post #87

Vinetrade 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 convin…

There were two big problems with the banks: 1. A number of wine investment companies took card payments but never bought the wine. So the bank was liable for the money lost in those situations - and as a result that put a blanket ban on all fine wine companies. We were able to talk Barclays around on this. 2. Storage of wine would be handled by a third party warehouse. If they screwed anything up (e.g. broke the case…

From the Vinetrade site:"Secure and trustworthy. Your transactions are encrypted."

Step 1: Start posting username/pwd to your server over HTTPS and start delivering signup & login forms over HTTPS.

At the moment, both of these happen in plain text so I don't see how you can say you take security seriously if you can't even get the low hanging fruit.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#176

Post by shtylman »

blibble wrote: post #141
shtylman wrote: post #132

You should look into bitcoin (at least know about it and how it can help you as a merchant). Any payment company that deals with credit cards is not just a payment company but a fraud detection service; at least that is what it should be selling themselves as. Fighting CC fraud (and bank transfer fraud) is a challenge as the system was not designed for the digital space.

it's far too difficult to acquire them at the moment for normal citizens, at least in the UK. I spent at least 4 hours trying to legitimately acquire bitcoins to purchase some pretty physical coins from https://www.casascius.com before giving up.

If you only spent 4 hours trying to acquire a completely new currency that is not backed by any major authority yet still usable all over the internet, you might want to spend some more time :) And yes, getting a hold of them is still a challenge. If you want to buy in bulk, you can wire money to many of the exchanges for standard wire rates.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#177

Post by contingencies »

mietek wrote: post #172
contingencies wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corp people handled it via HSBC bank account. Certainly not via randompaymentrelatedwebsite.com. But yeah, that sounds right!

Yeah, this website does looks random, hence my question, but it's what HSBC points to on their business pages: http://www.business.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/business-banking/business...

Not enough information on their page for me to ID it. If you try it and it contains an XML interfacing option with completely insane, unheard-of levels of verbosity around fraud rules, that's the one.

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#178

Post by namdnay »

kerneis wrote: post #171
namdnay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Carte Bleue system is more or less deprecated/integrated now, AFAIK they can all be treated as Visa cards

You are correct. But they are several reasons why the situation might seem complex for a foreigner. French people regularly use the term "carte bleue" to mean "debit card" (and most of the debit cards still feature the legacy "carte bleue" logo). Even worse, most of them say "carte de crédit" (credit card) when they really mean "debit card", because credit cards are very uncommon and people don't know the difference.…

The only true credit cards I see regularly in France are the Carte Pass (Carrefour hypermarkets) and Galeries Lafayette (department stores)

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#179

Post by fastspring »

stevoski wrote: post #165
mattmanser wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9% of your turnover vs ~ 3.1% of your turnover . You're a mad man to pay that much. It's a right pita, but it's not worth 6% of your company.

Let's get the comparison right. FastSpring charge me 5.9% + 50c A merchant account will cost me 3% + 30c. My software sells for $69. So it is 6.62% vs 3.43%. Actually it isn't. The comparison is (6.62%) vs (3.43% PLUS dealing with all those VAT issues, fraud detection, fighting and/or wearing chargebacks, coding and maintaining the payment system, allowing direct bank transfers in countries where consumers prefer the…

When you look at the service and functionality you get in exchange for paying more, you realize that in reality FastSpring actually means paying less, earning more (profit). Take a look at the FastSpring or SaaSy features pages, and as you go through the functionality and services listed, think through how much time it would take you to develop the same functionality on your own (years), how much more revenue you'd earn from day one by using this already existing global online selling functionality, how many distracting obstacles you get to avoid (try setting up on your own to accept foreign currencies and have your order page language-localized, not to mention to be able to manage global taxes and be in compliance on all global sales), the expenses you avoid taking on (you dont pay chargeback fees, you don't need the support or dev staff members you would otherwise need, you dont need to pay for file hosting), the risks you avoid (we are the merchant of record, not you, we deal with fraud and PCI compliance, you outsource to us potential company-killing risks like how credit card numbers are stored (btw we store none), the list goes on and on...

Re: Taking payments online in Europe in 2013

#180

Post by fastspring »

vidarh wrote: post #166
stevoski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost for a payment processor 3% and 30 cents per transaction PLUS the costs (time-related, development-related, support-related) to manage to obtain a merchant account, deal with VAT, fraud detection, a nice customer experience, and many other things. For startups you end up way ahead by NOT rolling your own solution to this and other problems.

There are plenty of businesses where 9% is more than the gross margin. And plenty of businesses where the gross margin is higher than 9% but small enough for you to be totally unable to compete if you spend 9% on transaction fees. It certainly can be worth it for high margin services and products, but it's by no means something that's always viable.

True. Though we mainly deal in downloadable software/games and SaaS where margins are usually pretty high.
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