

Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal, part 1/2 - bemmu
http://www.candyjapan.com/accepting-credit-cards-without-paypal-1

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BenjaminDyer
Payments is a really exciting space at the moment, its being disrupted at an
impressive rate and it seems a new provider pops up almost every day. While
its great to read this story I believe to a certain extent at the moment its
better the devil you know, especially if you are an established business.

I always recommend PayPal to our merchants, not only is it the quickest way to
send and receive money online its also backed up by one of the largest payment
networks in the world. Also lots of people have money in paypal accounts they
would like to spend, not everyone links it back to their bank account. For
E-Commerce sites you can expect to loose about 10% of sales by not offering
PayPal. However, I appreciate its not for everyone.

For alternatives, here I think it really depends on the size and type of your
business. If you are doing any type of volume the only serious way to receive
payments online is via a Payment Service Provider (PSP), and there are
millions of them. You can seriously reduce your transaction costs and often
you get some pretty weapons grade anti fraud protection thrown in.
Unfortunately setting up a PSP isn't as simple as it sounds, its a two stage
process starting with a Merchant Account. This space is pretty dominated by
the traditional banks so get ready for a little red tape. Once you have your
Merchant Account the PSP slice is normally fairly painless.

With regards to Stripe, I'd personally give any startup in this space some
time to debug and increase transactions before you trust them with your
business.

Nice read.

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narad
Can you name that German company? Curious to know.

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bemmu
I'm not sure how happy they would be that I'm blogging about the details of
the application process, but you can find it in the Recurly additional
providers list.

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rmoriz
Why not? They get paying customers, I'm sure they like it.

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mojaam
Interesting read. I didn't realize how lucky I am to be in the U.S. when it
comes to payment services. PayPal got such a huge clout!

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bemmu
I'm happy in the end we managed to a good gateway, but you definitely have
more choice being US-based.

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luxpir
Nicely done. Keen to get a decent solution for Europe too. What a gap in the
market.

Will be keeping an eye out for part 2.

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bemmu
Now that I just finished the process Braintree announced their Finland
support. Well, they just missed me:)

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rmoriz
the fixed base fee of Braintree (with vault + recurring option) is ~30% higher
than the Recurly + WireCard fees. If Braintree will have the same pricing for
intl as they currently have for US...

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diasks2
At first I was excited as I thought you were based in Japan and you were going
to give insight about payments in the Japanese market. Great post,
nonetheless. Does anyone have any good info on payment options in Japan
outside of PayPal. I'm aware of E-context, SBI, and Digital Check. I would
greatly appreciate any anecdotes, horror stories, or recommendations of other
payment options in Japan.

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kreitje
I understand why you prefer to move away from Paypal, however, why don't you
show Paypal on the subscribe page? There is just that 1 small blurb on the
front page.

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bemmu
Thanks, I'm still going to revamp the signup flow to include gifting, so I'll
think about adding that then.

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bbayer
congrats. How about refunds and bank transfer fees? Do they have stripe like
integration? Is it necessary to have a SSL certificate?

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bemmu
Thanks, I just started to so not totally sure of all the fees to the cent yet.
Seems like there is a refund button in Recurly.

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StephenFalken
In recent years, it's been interesting to watch the rise of Dwolla
(<https://www.dwolla.com/>) as an alternative payment network. It charges
nothing for under $10 transactions, and only $0.25 for any transaction over
$10, no matter how large it is. The only drawback is that, for now, it only
works in the US.

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freshnote
If this switch works for me, and I can finally be free of my PayPal
taskmasters, I'll be subscribing to your candy service!

