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Need to process payments?
- JarekS 16y agoI'm sorry but what does that mean "developer focused payment processing"? From the SaaS provider perspective - less time I spend on integration with such thing is better. "Developer focused payment processing" suggests rich API with high learning curve. Not really compelling value prop... BTW - don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting they have a bad product. I'm really curious how they can make payment processing developer focused!
- jarin 16y agoBraintree is a good example of developer-oriented payment processing. They provide very good APIs and client libraries, and they respond very quickly to developer suggestions and feature requests.
- jarin 16y agoCouple of questions: Does it handle subscriptions? Do you need a merchant bank account?
- vyrotek 16y agoI have the same questions. The most frustrating part of shopping around for these types of services is trying to figure out whats included and what isn't. Perhaps its just the nature of this market, but the fact that I have to purchase and manage additional services just to someone's special 'payment subscription service' is a pain.
- seanharper 16y agoThis is a shameless plug, but at http://transfs.com http://transfs.com (transparent financial services) we have a free webservice that helps you compare various payments options. It's strictly private and requires no commitment of any kind. Basically it's like Kayak for payments. However, we don't do international yet, so probably can't help the original poster. International payments are really hard, there are many fewer options in most foreign countries. Even in Canada and UK the number of merchant account providers is many fewer than in the US, giving the customer less choice and enabling the providers to maintain more of their archaic practices.
- zavulon 16y agoSign up, give my email address and information about my business before seeing ANYTHING? Sorry, in today's world this just won't cut it ...
- hassenben 16y agoThe views counter is not unique. Fun!
- subbu 16y agoI am not US based but still need a decent payment processing system. All existing payment processing companies are US-centric. Any luck for us?
- tomjen3 16y agoI have the same problem. Any startup who wants a wide open market?
- pg 16y agoI'm sure they will expand internationally as quickly as they can, because the founders themselves are from Europe.
- fredoliveira 16y agoHow 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 takes weeks, the setup takes weeks too, even if the new gateway needs only a few minutes to get you started on their end.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- blueben 16y agoSocialGold handles payments for a wide variety of international currencies and payment systems.
- run4yourlives 16y agoActually... 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.
- joubert 16y agoWhat's their name?
- bdickason 16y agoI just sent them an e-mail. I'm hoping this is a payment gateway :D Have a call with Braintree, but they require monthly minimums and a setup fee. If there was a scalable solution as follows, I'd jump onboard immediately: -Create an account (Free) -Start accepting payments at a slightly higher percent (3.5%?) -Percentage goes down as volume increases End the negotiation, setup fees, etc that are stuck in this archaic business please :(
- NEPatriot 16y agoI'm with you and see this as the solution to this mess as well. Give me a high % no monthly and lower my risk, once I've gotten some business and scale we can do the monthly thing.
- bdickason 16y agoUnfortunately, the credit card companies seem to disagree :( Or at least that's the response my brick and mortar payment gateway has given me in the past for something like this :( To get a decent rate for our salon, we had to project ridiculous revenue and pray that we came close to it to even get a reasonable rate.
- NEPatriot 16y agoYou 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.
- bdickason 16y agoI'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.
- loumf 16y agoJust 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 impediment. I don't want a merchant account. Subscriptions would be nice.
- pdx 16y agoI'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 create "Apple Payments", and charge you 30%, and I bet there are a lot of people who would do it.
- loumf 16y agoBasically 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.
- democracy 16y agolooks like they do: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_Beta_Subscriptions.html http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mgrouchy 16y agoI don't know what this startup is, but one option for startups to get started with payments is http://chargify.com http://chargify.com , their api is pretty solid and they are good with support and are focused recurring payment processing. Only issue is you still need a payment gateway such as Braintree, Authorize.NET, etc.
- sunir 16y agoHey, quick question. How long did it take you to get set up with Chargify?
- mgrouchy 16y agochargify itself, not too long. Especially if you do everything their way(we are kind of doing some weird things with it currently). If you don't want to write your own, there are a bunch of API libraries available for a bunch of languages as well as hosted paged for registration and payments if you need them. As everyone else has said, the long parts have been the up front setup time of the merchant account and payment gateway. All in all though, I'm pretty impressed with Chargifys offering.
- sunir 16y agoThanks! What kind of weird things are you doing that don't fit with the recurring model?
- mgrouchy 16y agoIts just that much of our billing system was done before we ended up switching to chargify, so some of integration pieces are kind of weird(probably not how we initially would have designed them) and we are looking at doing some things with quantity based pricing, where we do something similar to linode and charge you a prorated amount up front for a item then charge you the full amount during the next period. As well as offering prorated credits for removal of a product. This is not supported by Chargify yet, they only charge for items at the beginning of a period. If we were using a simple recurring subscription for this and not quantify based model this wouldn't be an issue, because they do offer prorated upgrades and downgrades for recurring subscriptions. Nothing overly complicated here, just have to hack around some of the current limitations of the platform.
- nissimk 16y agoI don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card processing online a commodity and using the least expensive solution the way to go?
- bdickason 16y agoPerhaps it's just a question of scale, and maybe I'm trying to solve problems that don't really exist. I'm hesitent to use paypal because when I _DO_ move to something more legit (ala Braintree or Authorize.net), I have to re-bill all of my customers and they have to put in their CC info again. This doesn't seem ideal to me.
- SwellJoe 16y agoWe moved from Authorize.net to PayPal Web Payments Pro. Much happier now. Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
- dan_manges 16y agoOur (Braintree) fees are competitive. We have a higher monthly minimum than some, if that's what you're referencing, but otherwise if a merchant is processing a few thousand dollars a month our fees are right in line. We are different than others in the industry. We engage in a meaningful way with our customers. We educate them on the risks, nuances and best practices. We try to properly assess risk upfront instead of surprising afterwards. We proactively help them lower fees. We assist with PCI Compliance and credit card data security. We don't hold stored credit card data hostage. We don't hide fees and then deny that we hid them in the first place. We answer our phones and respond to email very quickly. Our goal always been for our customers to conclude that we're the best payments provider they've ever worked with and many of our customers maintain that opinion which we're always very pleased to hear.
- SwellJoe 16y ago
- seregine 16y agoWe provide a REST-based API for processing payments for digital goods and more (subscriptions, virtual currency management). http://getsocialgold.com http://getsocialgold.com
- tansey 16y agoCan we get some more information? What are they doing better? What kind of fee structure are they selling? Also, one big concern in my startup is chargebacks. Does this service help me with chargeback protection at all? More generally: how will they make my life better?
- boucher 16y agoHave you actually gotten a lot of chargebacks? I've heard that the industry significantly exaggerates the amount of chargebacks that actually occur.
- tansey 16y agoWe haven't launched yet, but we're a digital goods marketplace and my intuition is that our niche audience may have a high chargeback rate. We're looking for any additional protection so we don't stumble out of the gate.
- bprater 16y agoUse Clickbank then. Everything you mention is what they've been doing for a decade.
- tansey 16y agoThanks. I had never heard of Clickbank before now. However, a quick look at their terms is a non-starter. They want 8.5% + $1 + 50% to the affiliate. On top of what we would charge, our sellers would be getting something like 30% of their sales. It's also not exactly the type of product we're selling. There are some subtle (but important) differences between Clickbank's target product and our product.
- SwellJoe 16y agoChargebacks 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 our fraudulent orders purchase the really expensive product right off the bat, while most of our legitimate purchasers of that product buy a less expensive one first, and then upgrade to the more expensive version later. So, I automatically flag orders for the most expensive product, and interact with the customer personally before letting the order go through. This is also a pain in the ass, but it does reduce the number of chargebacks.
- jules 16y agoDo you need a merchant account? Do you need an authorize.net or similar account? Do they handle subscriptions? What are their rates like? When do they expect to be available outside the US?
- moe 16y agoOut of curiosity, what would be the main differences to chargify and cheddargetter?
- seanharper 16y agoChargify and Cheddargetter and Recurly are competitors and their products are pretty similar. I cannot speak to their specific benefits and disadvantages.
- tjmaxal 16y agoDo they have a website?
- Artifex 16y agoAwesome! Thank you! Will there be plug-in capabilities for people who use CMS-type systems, such as wordpress? I see an increasing number of smaller e-commerce sites running on that platform lately...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pedoh 16y agoFrom a startup SaaS perspective, is it really that detrimental to have your customers sent to another site (Google Checkout or Amazon FPS, for example) and then brought back after the conclusion of the sale? Do enough customers walk away if the payment system is 3rd party visible as opposed to 3rd party behind the scenes? For any small startup trying to minimize costs, it seems like eliminating those monthly minimums and setup costs might outweigh the benefits of a more seamless customer experience. Can those with firsthand experience chime in?
- SwellJoe 16y agoIt doesn't matter, anymore. Our customers even occasionally asked for PayPal specifically because they trust PayPal's refund process, but maybe not our money back guarantee.
- barmstrong 16y agoClearly there is a pain here, so it would be awesome to see someone solve it. I'm really curious how they plan to do it though - since it seems like you'd essentially have to start your own bank to streamline the process. Too much regulation for that. What work around did they find??
- chintan 16y agoWE integrated with Amazon FPS. But customers didn't have AMZN accounts etc, so we started using the POMC method. "Plain Old Mail the Check". No more cuts. no more hassles.
- mahmud 16y agoDoes it handle invoicing?
- thinkcomp 16y agoAre we competitors? http://www.facecash.com http://www.facecash.com
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- keefe 16y agoIn the next few months, I'm going to launch a site with micropayments for particular bits of content. I'm currently researching different options and defaulting to FPS for obvious reasons, I wonder how this new service compares?
- roschdal 16y agoWhere can I invest in this company?
- Osiris 16y agoWhat I have a hard time finding is a service that offers low fees for small purchases, or micropayments. I sell a small software application that goes for $7. After trying a few places I've settled on PayPal micropayments which charges 5c + 5%, which comes out to about 7.5% for me. I'd be interested in anyone that could give good micropayment rates.
- known 16y agohttp://www.ccavenue.com/content/comparative.jsp http://www.ccavenue.com/content/comparative.jsp