

Ask HN: What payment system are you using? - trengul

We almost finished our startup and currently we need to choose a payment system, that will be easy to use, have a small commission, easy to implement (have a good and easy API) and can accept credit cards in USA, Europe and if possible Asia (China, Japan). What payment system are you using? What are advantages&#x2F;disadvantages? Thanks in advance
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dangrossman
For making the actual charges, a merchant account from an ISO, currently
Vantage Card [1]. I pay interchange plus (0.04% + $0.10) per transaction.
That's the fee charged by Visa/MasterCard to the processor, plus four
hundredths of a percent and a dime. For about a quarter of my volume which are
debit/check cards used as credit, that's just 0.09% + $0.31. For the rest, it
probably averages around 1.6-2%, far less than the 2.9% flat rate you'll get
offered by flashy payment startups.

I use Authorize.net as a payment gateway for that account [2]. If you do look
at merchant account providers, they'll typically set you up with a gateway,
you don't need to choose and sign up for one yourself. Just watch that they
don't use it as a way to add on more than nominal fees.

To actually hook everything up to my websites, I use Spreedly [3]. They're the
best thing to happen to payments in years. Spreedly is a single API for 66
different gateways and payment providers, meaning you code against Spreedly
and can switch payment companies any time you want without changing any code.
They're also a PCI Level 1 Certified card vault for storing payment
information to charge again in the future, for e.g. running a SaaS business.

They offer a pass-thru option where you point the payment form on your website
to their URL, and they return the visitor to your page with a token attached
that you can then use via their API to make charges, meaning no cardholder
data ever touches your servers. That means no on-site PCI audits or any of the
other nasty stuff required if you store cards yourself.

1: [http://www.vantagecard.com/](http://www.vantagecard.com/)

2: [http://www.authorize.net/](http://www.authorize.net/)

3: [https://spreedly.com/](https://spreedly.com/)

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trengul
Thanks. Can i use these services for Asia countries (China, Japan, Korea)?

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chatmasta
I would recommend Chargebee (www.chargebee.com). They provide a layer on top
of a dozen different backends, including Stripe, and handle all of the
annoying subscription logic you don't want to write code for.

The advantage of Chargebee is that you are not dependent on one backend or
merchant provider, and can always swap it out for another if you get booted or
want to try something else.

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hashtag
[https://stripe.com/](https://stripe.com/)

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trengul
Thanks. Advantages/Disadvantages?

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dangrossman
They're very expensive unless you do $80K+/month to negotiate rates, but the
service itself is great. I don't use them as I pay much less through a
merchant account, but I have set up others that are less technical and handle
less volume with Stripe.

