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Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

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Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#11

Post by robotmay »

Well I've worked with pretty much every provider available in the UK, so here are some brief opinions on the bigger ones:

PayPal: Awful, API changes regularly without warning (including changing parameter names for no apparent reason)

SagePay: Truly awful, datacentre seems to catch fire regularly

WorldPay: Awful, but not as bad as SagePay

Barclays ePDQ: You have to fill out an Excel spreadsheet to get a developer account

GoCardless: Great API, more or less limited to UK customers

Paymill: Good

Stripe: Very good

Braintree: Very complicated but not bad

And if you're downvoting me for this, feel free to ask for reasons why for specific providers. I have genuinely used all of them for at least one project.

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#12

Post by goldfeld »

lucaspiller wrote: post #6

I'm not going to get any "OMG new stuff" love for this, but we are currently in the process of integrating with Worldpay. We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal in that you redirect the user to them to enter their card details. However unlike Paypal (who we currently use) you can fully customise the pages, so it can match your site and appear pretty seamless. They also pr…

Well it seems their "World" doesn't include Latin America, same as all the other shiny new solutions, so PayPal and BitCoin are still the only game in town down here in Brazil.

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#13

Post by apexauk »

(I work at Stripe, here in London)

Great write-up - I hadn't seen that graphic before but it's great - full credit to the original source http://startingandsustaining.com/.

As a Stripe-r, I can't complain about the OP's conclusion in any way :) As stated they are based in Denmark, and Stripe is not currently available for Danish businesses - that's on us to fix, and we're certainly working on it.

However, re: the title "How to choose a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup" - the situation in Denmark is not representative of Europe as a whole.

Stripe has now launched here in the UK[1], and we now have betas available in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium - with the latest released in the past few weeks. So if you're based on one of those countries, please do give us a look. And if you're based elsewhere, well - I guess we need to keep up the pace and hurry to your country ;)

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/introducing-stripe-uk

As other commenters have mentioned, it's really easy to make mistakes comparing complex pricing across different providers. With Stripe and PAYMILL, the fees quoted are all you pay. With Braintree's interchange+ pricing, they actually state themselves that "Total costs are typically 1.8% to 2.6% of the transaction. There is a minimum cost of €100 per month"[2]

[2] https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing-question

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#14

Post by lucaspiller »

goldfeld wrote: post #12
lucaspiller wrote: post #6

I'm not going to get any "OMG new stuff" love for this, but we are currently in the process of integrating with Worldpay. We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal in that you redirect the user to them to enter their card details. However unlike Paypal (who we currently use) you can fully customise the pages, so it can match your site and appear pretty seamless. They also pr…

Well it seems their "World" doesn't include Latin America, same as all the other shiny new solutions, so PayPal and BitCoin are still the only game in town down here in Brazil.

What are the main payment methods there?

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#16

Post by goldfeld »

lucaspiller wrote: post #14
goldfeld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it seems their "World" doesn't include Latin America, same as all the other shiny new solutions, so PayPal and BitCoin are still the only game in town down here in Brazil.

What are the main payment methods there?

Credit cards for sure, I suppose many are international too so americans can easily get our money. It's the other way around that's tricky, setting up a SaaS from here and getting a payout. PayPal is here so they work with Brazilian banks. As for all the other payment processors, no luck. Though someone here linked to Intel's solution[1], which proxies through PayPal and seems like the way I'll go.

[1] http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/comm...

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#18

Post by marcusbrown »

stephanos2k wrote: post #2

I evaluated payment provider for my Germany-based SaaS and came to a similar conclusion. Paymill is great to get started, but Braintree wins in the long run (just do the math). Obviously when your product is growing you don't have time to just rewrite the payment processing and migrate all data to a different provider. I guess this is where something like "Spreedly" comes in. It is an additional abstraction that allo…

We chose Spreedly for our startup and it was really easy to integrate. I like the idea of having the customer's credit cards details saved independently from the Payment Gateway and Merchant account, so that you're free to switch any time you want if you find a better deal in just 5 minutes via the control panel.

Beside this though we found 2 main problems along the path:

1) Setting up a merchant account for multi currency (we charge in USD and get paid in EUR) is a nightmare and it takes a lot of time (in the end it took more than 3 months!). Things get much more complicated and costs can rise quickly. Also, you have to register with American Express separately and you have to do it for 2 separate accounts (one for euros and one for dollars). So you end up with lots of different accounts (one for Spreedly, one for the payment gateway, one for the Visa+Mastercard merchant account, one for American Express) and this makes things much more complicated to manage.

2) Spreedly decided in the last months to focus just on the Spreedly Core (vaulting the credit card data in a secure place) and sold the subscription part to Pin Payments http://blog.spreedly.com/2013/07/15/pin-payments-purchases-s... So this means that the developing of new features was dropped and their minimal control panel stayed the same over the last couple of years. Not sure if this is going to change in the future with Pin Payments, but it's always a big question mark for the future. Support and maintenance is still covered, but I wouldn't expect any new stuff for the future...

So I guess that in the end if I were in your place I would stick with Braintree or Paymill, and we would probably have chosen Braintree if at that time they would have offered the payment gateway and merchant account as well (they started only since last year I think).

I'm looking forward to see Stripe coming in Europe and hopefully cover all the states very soon.

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#19

Post by sleepyhead »

lucaspiller wrote: post #6

I'm not going to get any "OMG new stuff" love for this, but we are currently in the process of integrating with Worldpay. We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal in that you redirect the user to them to enter their card details. However unlike Paypal (who we currently use) you can fully customise the pages, so it can match your site and appear pretty seamless. They also pr…

"We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal"

But this is a huge deal breaker. Conversions for external payments forms are lower, particularly with PayPal which has poor UX and is PayPal-branded.

Re: Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

#20

Post by sleepyhead »

robotmay wrote: post #11

Well I've worked with pretty much every provider available in the UK, so here are some brief opinions on the bigger ones: PayPal: Awful, API changes regularly without warning (including changing parameter names for no apparent reason) SagePay: Truly awful, datacentre seems to catch fire regularly WorldPay: Awful, but not as bad as SagePay Barclays ePDQ: You have to fill out an Excel spreadsheet to get a developer acc…

I looked very closely at Braintree but ended up not implementing them because of their €100 minimum per month. I don't understand how you say their API is complicated. It is well documented. The Ruby Gem also seems quite good and easy to implement. As you host the form and data is sent to Braintree there is also very little to get it up and running.
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