Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are vastly underestimating the effort required in setting up a payment gateway in a country.
Why? It's just some contracts and APIs. And it doesn't explain all those other startups that deliberately limit themselves (and then later have to buy local clones because they did not expand quickly enough).
Samwers Clone Stripe
71–80 of 167 posts
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#72I don't get it. Why do US net startups very often make the same mistake of not expanding into the whole world quickly? It took eBay something like 4 years to go to Germany, by which time there was a local clone there that proved to be uncatchable. The expensive result was that eBay had to buy the clone (Alando) for 43 million dollars to become relevant. Kickstarter is still US-only. Stripe as well. So are countless o…
Groupon took your advice and (in my opinion) has contributed to their poor numbers. The problem is that when an established US company looks to expand, those countries tend to put a premium on expansion there. For example, if Groupon expands to the UK, sales people will ask for more money up front and put a premium on "acting faster". Oh, and pretty much what everyone else mentioned... It's extremely difficult for an…
Edit: Actually, Marc Samwer was head of international operations until earlier this year: http://gigaom.com/europe/marc-samwer-out-as-groupons-interna...
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#73Looks like they're a PHP shop and only offer PHP client libs yet. Seems they didn't even understand the message Stripe has in kinds of developer focus. Also: Why would I use a payment service of the biggest copy cat company in the country ? To deliver them my revenue numbers on a silver plate so they can decide if they should "enter my market"? They don't even openly publish the upcoming fees and just want you to "ve…
I want European credit card billing _NOW_. Sadly, the only support german companies it seems. :-(
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#74Now that Europe has had this, where's Canada? Am I still stuck with PayPal as my only viable option for payments?
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#75I don't get it. Why do US net startups very often make the same mistake of not expanding into the whole world quickly? It took eBay something like 4 years to go to Germany, by which time there was a local clone there that proved to be uncatchable. The expensive result was that eBay had to buy the clone (Alando) for 43 million dollars to become relevant. Kickstarter is still US-only. Stripe as well. So are countless o…
You are vastly underestimating the effort required in setting up a payment gateway in a country.
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Groupon took your advice and (in my opinion) has contributed to their poor numbers. The problem is that when an established US company looks to expand, those countries tend to put a premium on expansion there. For example, if Groupon expands to the UK, sales people will ask for more money up front and put a premium on "acting faster". Oh, and pretty much what everyone else mentioned... It's extremely difficult for an…
Facebook didn't do the mistake of buying the local German copycat (StudiVZ). StudiVZ is now dead.
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Although Recurly could be technically used in Europe, it generates invalid invoices (at least here in Spain). We are switching away from it, and personally, I do not recommend it anymore.
well. you could do your own invoicing if you're not satisfied with the pdf they generate. Stripe and Paymill don't do invoicing, too.
The specific issue with Recurly that we had is that they silently changed their platform to perform VIES validation on all VAT numbers. While this makes sense for transactions with entities from outside of the merchant's country, validating VAT numbers for German-to-German or Spanish-to-Spanish transactions is silly. Not only do such transactions always get charged VAT, but it's possible that a given string is a valid VAT number and yet is not present in VIES. Since you will pay (and therefore charge the customer) VAT for same-country transactions anyway, you don't care if the number that the customer provided is valid according to VIES.
This change has cost us a little wave of support tickets and an ugly workaround, in preparation for moving off Recurly.
I firmly believe that a company that gets online recurring payments right in Europe will become a money-printing machine in no time.
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#78They've even copied someone's logo! http://www.launchbit.com/
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want European credit card billing _NOW_. Sadly, the only support german companies it seems. :-(
An opportunity to clone the clone in other European countries?
Re: Samwers Clone Stripe
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are vastly underestimating the effort required in setting up a payment gateway in a country.
But if you are Stripe and you get millions in investments ( i.e. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/sexy-payments-startup-strip... ) you can afford to hire specific european nation experts, lawyers etc.. to get into these markets quickly