8 ms·

Probably the number of countries in Europe, each of which has a slightly different banking system (never mind the general legal system or language). If I recall

by mhd 15y ago

Probably the number of countries in Europe, each of which has a slightly different banking system (never mind the general legal system or language). If I recall correctly, a lot of web services in general aren't even easily accessible for Canadians. I'm not quite sure about the rest of Europe, but payment options in Germany are generally quite different. Credit cards are getting more popular, but most transactions are done via direct bank transfer, often via a debit card. Wasn't that popular in the US, at least where I worked. So if you're selling something, just working out a deal with Visa and MasterCard isn't enough, as a lot of people won't be able to pay that way. Some web shops here have a huge amount of different payment options, credit cards, direct transfer (via a number of different companies), mobile phone payment (yuck), paypal etc. European startups would be more used to it, but start with a smaller original userbase, and thus less money available to expand.

rmc 15y ago
Probably the number of countries in Europe, each of which has a slightly different banking system (never mind the general legal system or language) Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the EU prevent this. Isn't there laws in place to standardize things?
- mhd 15y ago
  There are lots of lawyers who make money just with that, never mind bankers… Of course there are provisions in place that make it easier for the banks to communicate, as this is in the interest of the banks themselves. That doesn't instantly revoke every odd tax law that came up in each country over the course of a few hundred years of financial history… Yes, it's possible for me to wire money to anyone in Europe, if I run through a few hoops. And, well, it's not that much harder to wire it to the US or Nigeria. That doesn't mean that this is the approach you want to take with a customer. You want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money, so it would be great if you'd accept the preferred way to do that in his native country. And as I wrote above, not everybody's preferred way is via credit cards. Never mind that there's still a number of different currencies… The EU (and esp. the Euro) made it much easier. That doesn't mean it's easy.
  - ch2500 15y ago
    Wiring money to anyone in the EU _is_ easy now. Might not be the case for UK people because they still need to deal with foreign currencies ;)
    - mhd 15y ago
      I can't remember seeing a web shop that does IBAN/SWIFT transfers (apart from one or two small-time ebay sellers). I pay via wire transfer all the time within Germany, but outside it's credit card or paypal (and even the latter quite often requires a credit card transfer for that). It's not a big deal for corporate / professional deals with largers sums, i.e. a monthly €49 subscription. But if you're running some kind of browser game and want to get one-time €2.99 payments, you'll have to deal with a rather different demographic. Have yet to see an internatinal (at least pan-European) service that provides a good solution for that. Most of the time you have to cobble it together from all different local providers, and a lot of them look quite fishy to me (and that's saying something in that market).

by mhd 15y ago

rmc 15y ago

Probably the number of countries in Europe, each of which has a slightly different banking system (never mind the general legal system or language) Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the EU prevent this. Isn't there laws in place to standardize things?

mhd 15y ago
There are lots of lawyers who make money just with that, never mind bankers… Of course there are provisions in place that make it easier for the banks to communicate, as this is in the interest of the banks themselves. That doesn't instantly revoke every odd tax law that came up in each country over the course of a few hundred years of financial history… Yes, it's possible for me to wire money to anyone in Europe, if I run through a few hoops. And, well, it's not that much harder to wire it to the US or Nigeria. That doesn't mean that this is the approach you want to take with a customer. You want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money, so it would be great if you'd accept the preferred way to do that in his native country. And as I wrote above, not everybody's preferred way is via credit cards. Never mind that there's still a number of different currencies… The EU (and esp. the Euro) made it much easier. That doesn't mean it's easy.
- ch2500 15y ago
  Wiring money to anyone in the EU _is_ easy now. Might not be the case for UK people because they still need to deal with foreign currencies ;)
  - mhd 15y ago
    I can't remember seeing a web shop that does IBAN/SWIFT transfers (apart from one or two small-time ebay sellers). I pay via wire transfer all the time within Germany, but outside it's credit card or paypal (and even the latter quite often requires a credit card transfer for that). It's not a big deal for corporate / professional deals with largers sums, i.e. a monthly €49 subscription. But if you're running some kind of browser game and want to get one-time €2.99 payments, you'll have to deal with a rather different demographic. Have yet to see an internatinal (at least pan-European) service that provides a good solution for that. Most of the time you have to cobble it together from all different local providers, and a lot of them look quite fishy to me (and that's saying something in that market).