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Need to process payments?

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Re: Need to process payments?

#71

Post by [deleted] »

fredoliveira wrote: post #38
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they will expand internationally as quickly as they can, because the founders themselves are from Europe.

How are they doing things differently from a merchant account perspective? We just finished setting up a merchant account for one of our products and that process is a huge productivity bottleneck. There are a number of solutions out there today for startups who want to process payments (chargify comes to mind) but they all pretty much have the same problem - having to deal with a merchant account setup. If that take…

[deleted]

Re: Need to process payments?

#72

Post by SwellJoe »

seanharper wrote: post #50
SwellJoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At low volume, PayPal Payments Pro is as good as anything I've found, and it is cheaper than almost every other merchant services provider (especially by the time you factor in the gateway fees). But, it's definitely not cheap. I ache every time I see how much of our revenue is going to PayPal, even if it's better than the prior provider we were using. Our prior merchant services provider had cranked up rates gradual…

The issue that you describe where your prior merchant account provider billed you a downgrade rate for 90% of your transactions isn't really because they were "high-risk" (they weren't, you have no downgrades). It's an example of "marking up the downgrades" which is a strategy that unscrupulous merchant account providers use to increase their profit. http://transfs.com/blog/marking-up-downgrades/ What they really mea…

This is another of the problems with the payments industry. A serious lack of transparency pervades it. I never knew what was going on with our payments and fees and such. They just kept getting higher every couple of months. They hide behind wall-of-text terms of service (pages and pages of it), and ridiculous application processes wherein you don't know what your rates will be until after you jump through all the crazy hoops and send a bunch of faxes back and forth for several weeks.

Obviously, I've got a lot of hostility about the payments industry. Switching to PayPal (which took less than 24 hours to setup, and took just a few minutes of my time for filling out the application) was a breath of fresh air over Authorize.net, where I had to deal with a mentally retarded reseller (I'm not being facetious; retardation is the only explanation for some of the questions she asked and her grasp of the English language, despite being a native speaker) for three weeks to get things working.

Re: Need to process payments?

#76

Post by thinkcomp »

bdickason wrote: post #23
NEPatriot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should checkout squareup.com/features - I don't work for them. No monthly fees. 2.75% + $.15 if card is present. Though I think they are in beta and people in the forums were complaining about not getting the hardware last I looked about a week ago. It's for brick and mortar operations.

I'm definitely familiar with Square. I actually 'pitched' them to alot of people at a recent flea market that I attended. We're paying 1.9% right now on card present w/ a $100 monthly fee and doing $45k revenue per month at our salon. So it's working for us at the moment. I'm definitely interested in Square and as they mature, we'll go through the whole 'credit check' etc process.

Would you be interested in testing out FaceCash (if you're in CA, NY or MA)?

Re: Need to process payments?

#77

Post by loumf »

pdx wrote: post #17
loumf wrote: post #10

Just to put my two cents out there in case someone knows someone who does this. I consider what Apple does to be exactly what I want on the web. I just fork over 30% (no minimums) and literally never think about it. I get that I need to integrate for the web, but I don't want much more than that. I'm not trying to build a big business, just some side stuff where any time spent on payment processing is a huge impedime…

I'm a little confused what you're asking for. Do you want them to run the web store as well, so you really don't have to think (such as yahoo does?), or do you just want somebody to process transactions for you, (such as PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout do?) For somebody willing to drop 30% (or even 3%-5%) on a payment processing solution, there are lots of them. But, I bet we could convince Steve Jobs to…

Basically no minimums and no merchant account. My account is with whoever is providing the service and that's it. Apple does a great job of making is seamless -- so I would want the equivalent of that for the web. I feel like Google Checkout + app engine could get there, but they don't do subscriptions.

Re: Need to process payments?

#78

Post by matasar »

tansey wrote: post #68
SwellJoe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chargebacks are such a pain in the ass that any number of chargebacks is a lot, in my book. One of the reasons I chose PayPal when we were switching providers a while back was to get better, and finer-grained, anti-fraud capabilities. It's still an issue, but it's manageable now. Interestingly, adding a really expensive product (about $1000) to our store provided a nice mechanism for catching fraud. Nearly 100% of ou…

We were thinking of doing a similar approach, basically verifying people's ID upon first purchase. However, we thought it might significantly decrease the number of customers. I suppose there's no free lunch here... verification will sacrifice volume.

You may run afoul of the credit card companies if you try to verify ID on purchase.

Re: Need to process payments?

#79

Post by cmelbye »

rit wrote: post #55
run4yourlives wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually... since these guys are YC - I offer my .02Cents. There are a number of us in this exact situation and it is a GIANT pain point. This market is basically untapped... if you can/want to tackle non-US payment processing, you will make a killing.

I do consulting work for a friend who has a surprisingly common problem: He needs to do card processing but only certain times out of the year. He goes to conventions and sells merchandise, etc and wants to be able to take credit cards but the monthly & inactivity fees would wipe him out. So far all I've seen that could fix this potentially is Square, but they have yet to ship out their swiping widgets to use to try…

Square sounds perfect for that. They are shipping out card swipers already, too. I would request another one if you haven't gotten yours yet.

Re: Need to process payments?

#80

Post by bdickason »

thinkcomp wrote: post #76
bdickason wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely familiar with Square. I actually 'pitched' them to alot of people at a recent flea market that I attended. We're paying 1.9% right now on card present w/ a $100 monthly fee and doing $45k revenue per month at our salon. So it's working for us at the moment. I'm definitely interested in Square and as they mature, we'll go through the whole 'credit check' etc process.

Would you be interested in testing out FaceCash (if you're in CA, NY or MA)?

Feel free to shoot me an intro e-mail. I visited your site and we would definitely try out something at our salon just to see how it goes :) Probably more like a pilot program but who knows! bradley@getmochi.com
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