For the nordics, I highly recommend Mondido, https://mondido.com
Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
201–210 of 244 posts
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spreedly, TokenEx, Very Good Security are some that I'm aware of. I'm surprised Stripe hasn't come with their own multi-processing router solution for enterprises at this point; whichever major payment processor who would do this, could become a de facto choice as primary or secondary payment gateway for enterprises requiring this.
hyperswitch[1] looks to be trying to work in this space. 1. https://github.com/juspay/hyperswitch
Nice! Didn't know this. There are commercial solutions which offer even more integrations https://www.ppro.com
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#203Some European alternatives you might be able to find/negotiate better fees with: - mollie (Netherlands) - adyen (Netherlands) - Klarna (Sweden) - Paylike (Denmark) - Mangopay (Luxembourg) - Quickpay (Denmark) (added in edit) The ones I've tried of those, have an OK development experience, maybe not as polished as Stripe, but much better than the alternatives that were around before Stripe (huge hassle back then). Ide…
None of these services is Merchant of Record (that handles taxes). Neither is Stripe. At this day and age, I don't understand why would any small to medium business that sells online internationally use anything else but Merchant of Records. International taxes are just a PITA that it's not worth trading a few percent of payment processor fee for a full-blown team of international tax accountants.
What are some Stripe alternatives that provide Merchant of Record?
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the ballpark figure for the payments for this side project? $200 seems extreme unless your side project is charging $10,000~ per payment.
Amount $4,500.00 Fee $310.80 > Application fees: $180.00 > Stripe processing fees:$130.80
That is insane. Why is there no other developer-first payment service like Stripe?
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SEPA in EU is already something but it is taking ages for it to become an actual payment platform in everyday's life. Is there anything stopping merchants from offering different prices to people based on different payment methods? I assume the reason merchants do not list a discount for paying via SEPA or ACH or debit card or whatever local non credit card (and non Visa/Amex/MC) option, is because merchants benefi…
In some countries it is illegal to charge different prices based on which payment method is used. Here in Italy for example there is a lot of discussion around this topic now that most stores are legally bound to accept digital payments but cannot charge a different price if you pay with card instead of cash.
That is a bad rule. It hides the cost of the CC for the consumer. Ideally the card holder should pay the whole fee and it should be on the recipe.
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#206Some European alternatives you might be able to find/negotiate better fees with: - mollie (Netherlands) - adyen (Netherlands) - Klarna (Sweden) - Paylike (Denmark) - Mangopay (Luxembourg) - Quickpay (Denmark) (added in edit) The ones I've tried of those, have an OK development experience, maybe not as polished as Stripe, but much better than the alternatives that were around before Stripe (huge hassle back then). Ide…
> Ideally, you'll support at least two providers you can switch between, if you can afford the development of supporting two It is however not that simple if you want to remember your customers payment information, and don’t want any PCI-DSS liability or obligations. You’ll need a card vaulting solution in the middle, which comes as additional burden (and cost!) on top of the other payment provider integration. There…
Even with a card vaulting solution I think it may be difficult to support more than one provider, at least for Visa and MasterCard, due to Visa's Stored Credentials Framework (SCF). SCF was a set of requirements for using stored cards that Visa originally announced would be required starting sometime around 2017, and MasterCard said they would adopt it too.
So many payment processors were going to fail to meet the deadline to implement it they moved it back a year. The main payment processor we use met that deadline and we started using it. But many others did not and it was pushed back another year. I'm not sure when it finally actually came into effect because I didn’t pay much attention after that.
Under SCF when you charge a card and intend to store that card you have to set a flag in the transaction signaling that intent. After the transaction you need to save the Visa or MasterCard assigned transaction ID.
Later, when you use the stored card there's flag you have to set that marks this transaction as using a stored card, a flag you have to set if the charge is merchant initiated (e.g., an automatic subscription renewal) rather than customer initiated (e.g., they order something from website and elect to put it on their on file card), and you have to provide the transaction ID of the transaction that was done when you first stored the card.
It's that prior transaction ID that is the problem. With many payment processors the transaction ID they give you is one they generate, not the one that Visa or MasterCard generates.
As part of implementing SCF those processors will remember the Visa or MasterCard transaction associated with transactions that had the "we are going to store this card" flag set, and so later when you use the stored card you just have to provide the transaction ID they gave you and they look up the Visa/MasterCard transaction ID to send to the card company.
So say you charge a new Visa card through provider X, setting the "we are going to store this card" flag. X gives you an X transaction number X-1234, which you remember, and X remembers that X-1234 means Visa transaction ID V918273.
A year later it is time to auto-renew that customer, and you want to do that through provider Y. But Y's interface expects a Y transaction ID. You can't give them X-1234 and have them do anything sensible with it.
As far as I can tell for many combinations of X and Y there is simply no way to do an on file charge at Y with a card that was put on file after an X transaction, except perhaps by at the time of the X transaction also doing something like a $1 authorize with Y and hoping that the Y transaction ID for that will work with Y for later doing an actual charge.
You need some way to get the Visa/MasterCard transaction ID, and you need X and Y to allow you to provide a Visa/MasterCard transaction ID for the SCF stuff.
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#207At first I thought, "well, inflation is affecting everyone." Then I realized if prices are going up due to inflation, Stripe's collected fees go up anyway. So now they're benefitting to the second degree with a higher percentage of already inflating revenues ;-) We'll put up our prices more to counteract it, and on it goes. It's not a terrible deal even at this level. We routinely see 4-5% creamed off the top of wire…
> We routinely see 4-5% creamed off the top of wire transfers we receive from the US through exchange rate variations, random bank fees, etc. Hmm, I'm in the UK, and the variance in currerncy exchange we see is usually 2.4% in the bank's favour, usually with an additional fixed fee of £20. 5% sounds like madness! For EU bank transfers, it's more like a 2% exchange variance, with zero fixed fee... so Stripe is now loo…
Hmm, I'm in the UK, and the variance in currerncy exchange we see is usually 2.4% in the bank's favour, usually with an additional fixed fee of £20. 5% sounds like madness!
I'm including variance from HMRC's published rates as well, so that can be a few percent on its own if the USDGBP shifted. We do find that some customers are worse than others though. I suspect some use local banks and are eating fees along the route and it all adds up. With some customers we get every single penny expected. Wire transfers seem to be quite messy and unpredictable compared to card payments.
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#208Yikes, these are substantial prices hikes! And what's this new nonsense about increased costs for "premium" cards? From here[0], it describes these cards as "Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard" - but why would Stripe charge more for the use of such cards? Surely the chargeback rate for businesses must be orders of magnitude lower than that of consumer cards? https://support.stripe.…
Consumer card fees are capped pretty low in EU (and still UK I guess), something like 0.30%. Commercial card fees are not capped and are more around 1.5% to 2.0% If anything, now that they have split consumer and commercial cards in their fees, it's the consumer card fees that are shockingly high.
This is the knowledge I was missing - I had assumed fees were capped across the board.
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#209Oh, so I'm going to pay more for customers who have "premium cards"? > Standard EU cards: 1.5% + €0.25 per transaction > Premium EU card: 1.9% + €0.25 per transaction That sounds completely backwards. They chose to have premium cards, not me.
This is not about actual premium cards. Premium cards are defined by Stripe as: > Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard The reason is that in 2015 the EU capped interbank fees to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Visa and Mastercard (and issuing banks) managed to carve out an exemption for payment cards that are issued to businesses. These cards do have much higher fees.…
It's still wrong that I would pay extra for those cards.
I understand that different networks have different fees. But I expect one type of card to cost me the same.
When you go to a store, you pay the same price, regardless of which card you have. What would be your reaction if you were charged more because you're using a specific type of card?
I can't ask my customers to foot the bill, so it's effectively 0.4% I lose.
Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
#210This ain't as bad as international PayPal... We (EU company) have clients paying from abroad via PayPal. I can't figure out what to do with this. We're being hit with 4.7% PayPal international fee, then ~ 3.75% fee to convert USD to our local currency to withdraw to our bank account. (PayPal won't let us withdraw USD.) Then another 2-3% to convert it back to USD in our bank to pay our supplier in USD. Imagine the tot…
What about opening a Wise account and transferring from Paypal to there?
Paypal won't allow you to add account in different currency than main currency of country you are based at. So if you are based in Switzerland they allow you to use Swiss franc account only. And they will insist on them making the conversion - they won't pay out USD or EUR.