10 ms·

PayPal Alternatives for Startups

132 points by thereyougo 7y ago

octosphere 7y ago
I like the nod to Coinbase. For me there needs to be more emphasis on paying with cryptocurrency as a legitimate form of payment. All these gatekeepers listed here can freeze your money at any time and you have to wade through paperwork and boring calls to support-desks to get your money back. With cryptocurrency the trust is already built with smart-contracts and there is no middleman to decide whether payments are released or not.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Is that actually true? I don't follow cryptocurrency that closely but I seem to remember headlines of a site shutting down and something like a million BTC disappearing forever and people never got it back.
  - Trias11 7y ago
    The key is not relying on any exchange/entity to hold your cryptofunds. There are software solutions (such as electrum master public keys) that can be used to dynamically generate “pay to” bitcoin addresses against your own bitcoin wallet without exposing you to any hacking risks.
    - genghisjahn 7y ago
      That’s right grandpa! Just generate an electrum master public key and you’re all set!
      - Trias11 7y ago
        Create Electrum wallet. Generate MPK. MPK allows you to generate unlimited number of bitcoin addresses that belongs to your wallet. There are softwares that do that.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- jMyles 7y ago
  > I like the nod to Coinbase. > the trust is already built with smart-contracts and there is no middleman to decide These two statements seem to be contradictory. Coinbase is certainly a middleman. I like (and use) a lot of Coinbase's offerings, but I think it's also a good time to start promoting a more truly distributed view of the merchant service side for payments.
  - travisjungroth 7y ago
    They’re absolutely contradictory. Coinbase will shut down accounts based on certain activity.
  - siruncledrew 7y ago
    IMO, Coinbase is in the same bucket as Paypal because they will decide to block transfers or freeze accounts if a violation of the User Agreement is presumed: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1905680-does-coinbase-freeze-accounts- https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/190... Coinbase also has internal wallet blacklists so transfering to any of those could lead to account issues (ex. Wallets associated with marijuana products, online pharmacies, or in OFAC countries).
- lawn 7y ago
  Well if you really want to remove the risk of a gatekeeper to freeze your money you shouldn't rely on Coinbase, which is a gatekeeper like all the others. Instead you should do transaction verification yourself.
- yhoiseth 7y ago
  My understanding is that by using public blockchains for payments, people can in some cases figure out who you are and what you've bought by tracing the transactions. Is this correct?
captn3m0 7y ago
Paypal alternatives for mostly _american_ startups.
- zegerjan 7y ago
  Adyen not even getting mentioned, very surprising as it handles most payments for Netflix and Spotify.
  - no1youknowz 7y ago
    Adyen won't talk to startups. They are not interested at all. The current state of the market for European players in the payment space, is that it's not startup friendly. Take companies HQ in Europe like Worldpay (London), Adyen (Netherlands), WireCard (Germany), Fidor Bank (Germany) and Mambu (Germany). Not one company wanted to talk to my startup. No problems with US based players. They are more than happy to work with startups and will actively work with you to become a unicorn. After all, the higher transactions the startup does, the more money they earn.
    - lapusta 7y ago
      Hi, I work at Mambu and our clients are predominantly Startups - https://www.mambu.com/clients https://www.mambu.com/clients Feel free to drop me an email at alexey.lapusta@mambu.com Although we do not provide payment services to businesses, rather a SaaS platform for Financial Institutions (e.g. WireCard may use Mambu as their Core Banking when providing banking services to their customers).
    - skrebbel 7y ago
      Mollie is Dutch and definitely talks to startups. They're similar to Stripe in many respects. https://www.mollie.com/ https://www.mollie.com/
- taheca 7y ago
  bolt.com is a great option for e-commerce companies who want checkout, payment processing and risk and fraud all in one solution
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
From the perspective of a consumer, this might be penny wise, pound foolish. When I buy a product from a company I am not familiar with, I look for the PayPal button. This is especially true if the product is some type of subscription. There is no way I am buying a subscription to something other than through PayPal. As a buyer, I know PayPal has my back, and that I can see and easily cancel any subscription. So, if you go with the alternatives, be aware there are likely millions of consumers like me who you are missing out on from the start.
- purerandomness 7y ago
  Interesting. For me, it's the opposite. I think of PayPal as evil, deceptive (think of the currecy conversion opt-out mechanism) and how many content creators got hurt by PayPal freezig their accounts. I'm relieved when I see a company found another way and doesn't make me use PayPal when paying.
  - Trias11 7y ago
    Consumers love PayPal because it’s more friendly to buyer (than to seller). Thus supporting PayPal is beneficial to vendor. For vendor it makes sense to exercise caution: not leaving large balance on PayPal account, attach only intermediary bank account to PayPal to prevent PayPal tapping into your funds at will and have reserved accept payment method in case PayPal gets awry on you
  - omnimus 7y ago
    They push conversion so hard. If you sell something in eur/usd while your origin country uses different currency paypal will allow you to send money only to bank account of that currency and country you are based in. They say it is required by law. Of course when you make the transfer they inform you that that bank account is not in eur/usd and that they have converted it for you. And their conversion rates were like 4% worse than my banks which is about 4% worse than something like transferwise/revolut. Cutting down ~8% thats after paypal fees is not fun. I switched.
- vezycash 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chrischen 7y ago
PayPal gets a lot of negative publicity from a handful of high profile temporary freezes.
- vezycash 7y ago
  >handful of high profile temporary freezes This is willful blindness. If these issues were indeed temporary, no one would complain. Those high profile cases were temporary because of the PR storm they raised - just like it does with Google. People wouldn't mind much if PayPal didn't also steal their money.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    If you honestly believe paypal is in the business of stealing a couple hundred grand from a few overnight success stories then you may be the one suffering from willful blindness.
    - abc-xyz 7y ago
      It's probably got less to do with PayPal purposely stealing from their customers, and more to do with PayPal's software freezing accounts of innocent people, and PayPal not being willing to allocate the resources necessary to prevent this theft.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        My thing is... How is it that it is now paypals property? How is that legal? I sure hope someone who lost 100 grand sues them for their money back plus lost income due to account freeze. We need to see more legal outcry over what basically ammounts to theft. I may even figure you could sue for defamation depending on the why of your account being frozen. If they claim anything negative. Plus it gives your entire enterprise a bad name without reason.
        carapace 7y ago
croisillon 7y ago
You know the famous spam "hello office, your password is [redacted] and I recorded you watching pr0n"? Well, I received such messages about my TransferWise password, so I obviously informed them, and what did they do? Simply shut down my TransferWise account. Would not recommend.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  I feel like this is lacking a lot of context. Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just doubting your recounting of things. I doubt transferwise is trigger happy about closing accounts and I've had good support experience with them overall.
  - joering2 7y ago
    Of course you are going to have good experience with them... until they shut you down. Funny thing is they literally block your incoming emails! I asked them 3 times for what info they keep on me per GDPR and they totally ignored me! They are in violation of GDPR which United Kingdom should be abide by, but they obviously don't care...
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      File a complaint with the ICO.
      - justinclift 7y ago
        This looks like the right url: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/your-personal-information-concerns/ https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/your-personal-informatio...
  - croisillon 7y ago
    I looked it up, it's an email signed "Kata" saying "There was no transaction made under the current account and it was deactivated for your own security. Please create a new account using a different email address just to be safe."
sbhn 7y ago
Liberty reserve
- ohyeshedid 7y ago
  No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve#History
nonconvergent 7y ago
Venmo is Paypal. Alternatives are provided without context as why you'd seek one out beyond mostly similar transaction fees.
vortico 7y ago
This is a good list, but many customers (i.e. more than 50% in my experience, especially if they're non-US) prefer to pay with PayPal rather than bank cards. Some don't even have bank cards. So if you use a service on this list, be sure to choose one that supports PayPal as a secondary payment method, like Shopify or Braintree, otherwise you could lose potential customers. I also find it funny that Braintree is on this list, since it's entirely owned by PayPal since 2014.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Why not just integrate two payment solutions (Paypal + something for cheaper card payments) instead of having a middleman in front of Paypal? That's how we do it in Europe... And we sometimes have a dozen of different payment options.
  - vortico 7y ago
    Some companies do that, but then you'd have two completely different systems to interact with your subscription system / shipping processor, handle refunds/chargebacks, automated emails, tax forms, etc. You've just gotta evaluate the cost/benefit. My company uses Shopify with several payment processors to get a single payment API.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      You just build an abstraction before Paypal/CC processor/whatever else...? From my calculations it is worth it even for small companies if they operate in EU.
      - vortico 7y ago
        An abstraction layer is the primary service Shopify, Braintree, etc provide.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  What's the underlying reason for people wanting to use PayPal? Hooking it up to their bank account (yikes) and not having to have a credit card? Are there analyses available on what type of products/services have this problem, and what customer base primarily wants PayPal? I refuse to do business with PayPal, due to the many many horror stories of them holding money hostage, issues with charitable donations, utterly opaque dispute resolution, etc. (I've had issues with them myself, as well, trying to make donations.) I'd love to know alternatives, not just to the features of PayPal (for which there are many), but for serving the customer base of PayPal.
jameslk 7y ago
I'm surprised Zelle isn't mentioned here. It's owned by the major banks and allows for business account transfers without fees. I use it to pay some US contractors. Most free services (e.g. Venmo) don't support business transfers and have low monthly transfer ceilings.
- streptomycin 7y ago
  I don't think it supports business transfers. https://www.zellepay.com/user-service-agreement https://www.zellepay.com/user-service-agreement "The Service is intended for personal, not business or commercial use. You agree that you will not use the Service to send or receive payments in connection with your business or commercial enterprise. We reserve the right to decline your registration if we believe that you are enrolling to use the Service with your business account or to receive business or commercial payments. We further reserve the right to suspend or terminate your use of the Service if we believe that you are using the Service for business or commercial purposes, or for any of the uses identified directly below."
  - jameslk 7y ago
    Maybe it depends what kind of account you have? Zelle is offered directly through my business bank account interface and it's what the bank recommends using as an alternative to ACH and wires.
  - edoceo 7y ago
    Wells Fargo directs users from the Bill Pay service into Zelle - and is aware that booth sides are business accounts and that payment is for commercial services.
- nickjj 7y ago
  Yeah, this just looks like a list where someone Googled all of the alternatives and put them into 1 article without ever using them or "really" looking for alternatives. Zelle is quite good. IMO it's the ideal way to accept payments for 1 on 1 services. Over the last 18 months I've done dozens of transactions with them to accept money as a freelancer. If you're in the US, it's a no brainer if your bank supports it. There's no fees and it's quite fast to get the funds, plus there's no other service to sign up for since it's a part of your bank's dashboard. But for selling digital goods to the masses you're leaving a lot on the table if you don't support PayPal. I don't think there is an alternative to it because customers will use whatever is comfortable for them and if they prefer PayPal and you don't support it, you may lose that sale.
jammygit 7y ago
I read over and over how companies skip PayPal or remove PayPal and are startled by the lost business. (No direct experience though) For example, https://fman.io/blog/paypal-vs-stripe-for-small-businesses-in-2019/ https://fman.io/blog/paypal-vs-stripe-for-small-businesses-i...
YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
I was recently at an annual meeting of local fisherman where they had to pay dues but the platform they use for their website and due payments had stopped using paypal insisting on accepting payment thru cards only. guess what, 80% of the people said paypal worked just fine and its not our problem, its either cash or paypal, we aren't handing over our credit card info to another online website. I was shocked but that seems to be the norm in non-tech circlss
superasn 7y ago
Some payment processors on this list are 100 times more evil than Paypal and do all the things you hate about Paypal but worse. Story time: The biggest offender in my limited experience in dealing with some alternatives is 2checkout. Please please stay away from it. They can make up any excuse and shut you down with a two word excuse (we were told "digital locker" for a saas site which created html5 animations and our account was shutdown without notice (with no way to appeal) also locking out all customers and their payment info.. at that time it was like Paypal so they had all the cc info not us). Lost thousands of dollars per month and had to email users by hand to switch to Paypal. So do your due diligence and read reviews before signing up and trusting anyone on the list
zokessss 7y ago
As a cautionary tale. It's a good idea to say AWAY from Veem as well. I received my salary via veem. First few transfers were good. I got the rate they mentioned on there homepage. But later, they started giving me absurd rates and said there homepage currency converter tool is broken and what they are transferring to my bank account is final rate. There was absolutely no way of finding out the rate you were going to get paid. Absolute bait and switch
rkho 7y ago
Going through this post and some of the other "X alternatives" posts on the site, I can't help but feel like these articles are just being content farmed by someone with no prior experience using these recommendations.
tadeusz_wojcik 7y ago
Anyone running small online business in a EU? How do you handle VAT? I'm currently researching it, will probably end up using Paddle.com (they charge 5% plus 0.5$) but would like to have some alternatives that similarly handle VAT across EU with better UX ideally.
- nik736 7y ago
  I built it myself with Braintree for processing (PayPal, Cards)
anthonyoduu 7y ago
There is a compelling case for a marketplace solution that allows startups and businesses to exchange currencies with each other and have their payments processed via a central counterparty that is regulated. Perhaps, VertoFX (https://www.vertofx.com https://www.vertofx.com) can help some of you on this thread with your FX and international payments needs. The good news is that VertoFX is built for businesses; therefore, it is well equipped to handle large transactional volumes.
gitgud 7y ago
It's funny how items 6 (2checkout) and 7 (Stripe) are almost identical in style. I believe Stripe was the original and 2checkout completely lifted their design...
akkad3a 7y ago
I can't believe it's 2019 and startups are still accepting terms of service to receive value. Crypto-currency is here and removes all of these trusted 3rd parties that can and will shut you down for any number of reasons, not to mention their outrageous fees, chargebacks, and incompatible APIs, which make it painful to migrate to another provider. If you can, ditch this system and build for the future. https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver
jpomykala 7y ago
Paddle.com

132 points by thereyougo 7y ago

I like the nod to Coinbase. For me there needs to be more emphasis on paying with cryptocurrency as a legitimate form of payment. All these gatekeepers listed here can freeze your money at any time and you have to wade through paperwork and boring calls to support-desks to get your money back. With cryptocurrency the trust is already built with smart-contracts and there is no middleman to decide whether payments are released or not.

freehunter 7y ago
Is that actually true? I don't follow cryptocurrency that closely but I seem to remember headlines of a site shutting down and something like a million BTC disappearing forever and people never got it back.
- Trias11 7y ago
  The key is not relying on any exchange/entity to hold your cryptofunds. There are software solutions (such as electrum master public keys) that can be used to dynamically generate “pay to” bitcoin addresses against your own bitcoin wallet without exposing you to any hacking risks.
  - genghisjahn 7y ago
    That’s right grandpa! Just generate an electrum master public key and you’re all set!
    - Trias11 7y ago
      Create Electrum wallet. Generate MPK. MPK allows you to generate unlimited number of bitcoin addresses that belongs to your wallet. There are softwares that do that.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
jMyles 7y ago
> I like the nod to Coinbase. > the trust is already built with smart-contracts and there is no middleman to decide These two statements seem to be contradictory. Coinbase is certainly a middleman. I like (and use) a lot of Coinbase's offerings, but I think it's also a good time to start promoting a more truly distributed view of the merchant service side for payments.
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  They’re absolutely contradictory. Coinbase will shut down accounts based on certain activity.
- siruncledrew 7y ago
  IMO, Coinbase is in the same bucket as Paypal because they will decide to block transfers or freeze accounts if a violation of the User Agreement is presumed: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1905680-does-coinbase-freeze-accounts- https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/190... Coinbase also has internal wallet blacklists so transfering to any of those could lead to account issues (ex. Wallets associated with marijuana products, online pharmacies, or in OFAC countries).
lawn 7y ago
Well if you really want to remove the risk of a gatekeeper to freeze your money you shouldn't rely on Coinbase, which is a gatekeeper like all the others. Instead you should do transaction verification yourself.
yhoiseth 7y ago
My understanding is that by using public blockchains for payments, people can in some cases figure out who you are and what you've bought by tracing the transactions. Is this correct?

captn3m0 7y ago

Paypal alternatives for mostly _american_ startups.

zegerjan 7y ago
Adyen not even getting mentioned, very surprising as it handles most payments for Netflix and Spotify.
- no1youknowz 7y ago
  Adyen won't talk to startups. They are not interested at all. The current state of the market for European players in the payment space, is that it's not startup friendly. Take companies HQ in Europe like Worldpay (London), Adyen (Netherlands), WireCard (Germany), Fidor Bank (Germany) and Mambu (Germany). Not one company wanted to talk to my startup. No problems with US based players. They are more than happy to work with startups and will actively work with you to become a unicorn. After all, the higher transactions the startup does, the more money they earn.
  - lapusta 7y ago
    Hi, I work at Mambu and our clients are predominantly Startups - https://www.mambu.com/clients https://www.mambu.com/clients Feel free to drop me an email at alexey.lapusta@mambu.com Although we do not provide payment services to businesses, rather a SaaS platform for Financial Institutions (e.g. WireCard may use Mambu as their Core Banking when providing banking services to their customers).
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    Mollie is Dutch and definitely talks to startups. They're similar to Stripe in many respects. https://www.mollie.com/ https://www.mollie.com/
taheca 7y ago
bolt.com is a great option for e-commerce companies who want checkout, payment processing and risk and fraud all in one solution

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

From the perspective of a consumer, this might be penny wise, pound foolish. When I buy a product from a company I am not familiar with, I look for the PayPal button. This is especially true if the product is some type of subscription. There is no way I am buying a subscription to something other than through PayPal. As a buyer, I know PayPal has my back, and that I can see and easily cancel any subscription. So, if you go with the alternatives, be aware there are likely millions of consumers like me who you are missing out on from the start.

purerandomness 7y ago
Interesting. For me, it's the opposite. I think of PayPal as evil, deceptive (think of the currecy conversion opt-out mechanism) and how many content creators got hurt by PayPal freezig their accounts. I'm relieved when I see a company found another way and doesn't make me use PayPal when paying.
- Trias11 7y ago
  Consumers love PayPal because it’s more friendly to buyer (than to seller). Thus supporting PayPal is beneficial to vendor. For vendor it makes sense to exercise caution: not leaving large balance on PayPal account, attach only intermediary bank account to PayPal to prevent PayPal tapping into your funds at will and have reserved accept payment method in case PayPal gets awry on you
- omnimus 7y ago
  They push conversion so hard. If you sell something in eur/usd while your origin country uses different currency paypal will allow you to send money only to bank account of that currency and country you are based in. They say it is required by law. Of course when you make the transfer they inform you that that bank account is not in eur/usd and that they have converted it for you. And their conversion rates were like 4% worse than my banks which is about 4% worse than something like transferwise/revolut. Cutting down ~8% thats after paypal fees is not fun. I switched.
vezycash 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chrischen 7y ago

PayPal gets a lot of negative publicity from a handful of high profile temporary freezes.

vezycash 7y ago
>handful of high profile temporary freezes This is willful blindness. If these issues were indeed temporary, no one would complain. Those high profile cases were temporary because of the PR storm they raised - just like it does with Google. People wouldn't mind much if PayPal didn't also steal their money.
- chrischen 7y ago
  If you honestly believe paypal is in the business of stealing a couple hundred grand from a few overnight success stories then you may be the one suffering from willful blindness.
  - abc-xyz 7y ago
    It's probably got less to do with PayPal purposely stealing from their customers, and more to do with PayPal's software freezing accounts of innocent people, and PayPal not being willing to allocate the resources necessary to prevent this theft.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      My thing is... How is it that it is now paypals property? How is that legal? I sure hope someone who lost 100 grand sues them for their money back plus lost income due to account freeze. We need to see more legal outcry over what basically ammounts to theft. I may even figure you could sue for defamation depending on the why of your account being frozen. If they claim anything negative. Plus it gives your entire enterprise a bad name without reason.
      - carapace 7y ago

croisillon 7y ago

You know the famous spam "hello office, your password is [redacted] and I recorded you watching pr0n"? Well, I received such messages about my TransferWise password, so I obviously informed them, and what did they do? Simply shut down my TransferWise account. Would not recommend.

scrollaway 7y ago
I feel like this is lacking a lot of context. Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just doubting your recounting of things. I doubt transferwise is trigger happy about closing accounts and I've had good support experience with them overall.
- joering2 7y ago
  Of course you are going to have good experience with them... until they shut you down. Funny thing is they literally block your incoming emails! I asked them 3 times for what info they keep on me per GDPR and they totally ignored me! They are in violation of GDPR which United Kingdom should be abide by, but they obviously don't care...
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    File a complaint with the ICO.
    - justinclift 7y ago
      This looks like the right url: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/your-personal-information-concerns/ https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/your-personal-informatio...
- croisillon 7y ago
  I looked it up, it's an email signed "Kata" saying "There was no transaction made under the current account and it was deactivated for your own security. Please create a new account using a different email address just to be safe."

sbhn 7y ago

Liberty reserve

ohyeshedid 7y ago
No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve#History

nonconvergent 7y ago

Venmo is Paypal. Alternatives are provided without context as why you'd seek one out beyond mostly similar transaction fees.

vortico 7y ago

This is a good list, but many customers (i.e. more than 50% in my experience, especially if they're non-US) prefer to pay with PayPal rather than bank cards. Some don't even have bank cards. So if you use a service on this list, be sure to choose one that supports PayPal as a secondary payment method, like Shopify or Braintree, otherwise you could lose potential customers. I also find it funny that Braintree is on this list, since it's entirely owned by PayPal since 2014.

TomMarius 7y ago
Why not just integrate two payment solutions (Paypal + something for cheaper card payments) instead of having a middleman in front of Paypal? That's how we do it in Europe... And we sometimes have a dozen of different payment options.
- vortico 7y ago
  Some companies do that, but then you'd have two completely different systems to interact with your subscription system / shipping processor, handle refunds/chargebacks, automated emails, tax forms, etc. You've just gotta evaluate the cost/benefit. My company uses Shopify with several payment processors to get a single payment API.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    You just build an abstraction before Paypal/CC processor/whatever else...? From my calculations it is worth it even for small companies if they operate in EU.
    - vortico 7y ago
      An abstraction layer is the primary service Shopify, Braintree, etc provide.
JoshTriplett 7y ago
What's the underlying reason for people wanting to use PayPal? Hooking it up to their bank account (yikes) and not having to have a credit card? Are there analyses available on what type of products/services have this problem, and what customer base primarily wants PayPal? I refuse to do business with PayPal, due to the many many horror stories of them holding money hostage, issues with charitable donations, utterly opaque dispute resolution, etc. (I've had issues with them myself, as well, trying to make donations.) I'd love to know alternatives, not just to the features of PayPal (for which there are many), but for serving the customer base of PayPal.

jameslk 7y ago

I'm surprised Zelle isn't mentioned here. It's owned by the major banks and allows for business account transfers without fees. I use it to pay some US contractors. Most free services (e.g. Venmo) don't support business transfers and have low monthly transfer ceilings.

streptomycin 7y ago
I don't think it supports business transfers. https://www.zellepay.com/user-service-agreement https://www.zellepay.com/user-service-agreement "The Service is intended for personal, not business or commercial use. You agree that you will not use the Service to send or receive payments in connection with your business or commercial enterprise. We reserve the right to decline your registration if we believe that you are enrolling to use the Service with your business account or to receive business or commercial payments. We further reserve the right to suspend or terminate your use of the Service if we believe that you are using the Service for business or commercial purposes, or for any of the uses identified directly below."
- jameslk 7y ago
  Maybe it depends what kind of account you have? Zelle is offered directly through my business bank account interface and it's what the bank recommends using as an alternative to ACH and wires.
- edoceo 7y ago
  Wells Fargo directs users from the Bill Pay service into Zelle - and is aware that booth sides are business accounts and that payment is for commercial services.
nickjj 7y ago
Yeah, this just looks like a list where someone Googled all of the alternatives and put them into 1 article without ever using them or "really" looking for alternatives. Zelle is quite good. IMO it's the ideal way to accept payments for 1 on 1 services. Over the last 18 months I've done dozens of transactions with them to accept money as a freelancer. If you're in the US, it's a no brainer if your bank supports it. There's no fees and it's quite fast to get the funds, plus there's no other service to sign up for since it's a part of your bank's dashboard. But for selling digital goods to the masses you're leaving a lot on the table if you don't support PayPal. I don't think there is an alternative to it because customers will use whatever is comfortable for them and if they prefer PayPal and you don't support it, you may lose that sale.

jammygit 7y ago

I read over and over how companies skip PayPal or remove PayPal and are startled by the lost business. (No direct experience though) For example, https://fman.io/blog/paypal-vs-stripe-for-small-businesses-in-2019/ https://fman.io/blog/paypal-vs-stripe-for-small-businesses-i...

YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago

I was recently at an annual meeting of local fisherman where they had to pay dues but the platform they use for their website and due payments had stopped using paypal insisting on accepting payment thru cards only. guess what, 80% of the people said paypal worked just fine and its not our problem, its either cash or paypal, we aren't handing over our credit card info to another online website. I was shocked but that seems to be the norm in non-tech circlss

superasn 7y ago

Some payment processors on this list are 100 times more evil than Paypal and do all the things you hate about Paypal but worse. Story time: The biggest offender in my limited experience in dealing with some alternatives is 2checkout. Please please stay away from it. They can make up any excuse and shut you down with a two word excuse (we were told "digital locker" for a saas site which created html5 animations and our account was shutdown without notice (with no way to appeal) also locking out all customers and their payment info.. at that time it was like Paypal so they had all the cc info not us). Lost thousands of dollars per month and had to email users by hand to switch to Paypal. So do your due diligence and read reviews before signing up and trusting anyone on the list

zokessss 7y ago

As a cautionary tale. It's a good idea to say AWAY from Veem as well. I received my salary via veem. First few transfers were good. I got the rate they mentioned on there homepage. But later, they started giving me absurd rates and said there homepage currency converter tool is broken and what they are transferring to my bank account is final rate. There was absolutely no way of finding out the rate you were going to get paid. Absolute bait and switch

rkho 7y ago

Going through this post and some of the other "X alternatives" posts on the site, I can't help but feel like these articles are just being content farmed by someone with no prior experience using these recommendations.

tadeusz_wojcik 7y ago

Anyone running small online business in a EU? How do you handle VAT? I'm currently researching it, will probably end up using Paddle.com (they charge 5% plus 0.5$) but would like to have some alternatives that similarly handle VAT across EU with better UX ideally.

nik736 7y ago
I built it myself with Braintree for processing (PayPal, Cards)

anthonyoduu 7y ago

There is a compelling case for a marketplace solution that allows startups and businesses to exchange currencies with each other and have their payments processed via a central counterparty that is regulated. Perhaps, VertoFX (https://www.vertofx.com https://www.vertofx.com) can help some of you on this thread with your FX and international payments needs. The good news is that VertoFX is built for businesses; therefore, it is well equipped to handle large transactional volumes.

gitgud 7y ago

It's funny how items 6 (2checkout) and 7 (Stripe) are almost identical in style. I believe Stripe was the original and 2checkout completely lifted their design...

akkad3a 7y ago

I can't believe it's 2019 and startups are still accepting terms of service to receive value. Crypto-currency is here and removes all of these trusted 3rd parties that can and will shut you down for any number of reasons, not to mention their outrageous fees, chargebacks, and incompatible APIs, which make it painful to migrate to another provider. If you can, ditch this system and build for the future. https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver

jpomykala 7y ago

Paddle.com