Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup

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 allows you to switch payment providers easily. At least so I read. Does anyone have experiences with that?

Thanks for the blog post and going into how difficult it is to accept payments in Europe.

I would like to add one - IMHO important - point to PayMill: They do not support credit cards from the USA.

source: https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/pricing/ (click on "fees for card types and countries" - the US is not mentioned in that list)

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 provide a full merchant integration, but we didn't want to have to deal with the full PCI compliance thing.

The main reasons why we chose them are:

a) None of the shiny new providers (we tried Braintree and Paymill) would accept us as we are a travel booking service.

b) Their rates were better than anyone else we looked at.

If you are taking a large volume of payments you may want to consider switching to them. However for a small startup probably not, as we have to pay a fairly large monthly fee on top of transaction fees (but overall it works out cheaper).

EDIT: Also regarding currency conversion costs we accept payments in USD, EUR and GBP and have bank accounts in all three.

In the long run yes, when they have revenue. But they mention:

But then, one day when I came back to their website, I saw that they had added a minimum fee of €100 to their plan, and that unfortunately tipped the scale for us, as we pay everything on our own, and we have zero revenue coming in.

So the problem is for the first few months during which you pay everything out of your own pocket. It probably all depends on how confident you are that you'll get revenue.

How simple/hard is it to migrate from system to another?

Of all the things, Intel also has a payment processor as part of their cloud service platform - http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/comm... - I don't know why it's still labeled "beta" and how and if it actually works but it seems to work in about 50 countries now.