

Ask HN: Are there decent alternatives to PayPal? - tav

I'm looking for an integrated payment handling solution for my startup but am cautious of PayPal given all the horror stories. The Amazon solutions aren't particularly attractive and they're not available in the UK afaik. Has anyone had experience with Google Checkout?<p>My ideal would be something like http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ -- they look awesome but are unfortunately US-only. There seems to be a UK-clone http://subsify.com/ -- but they haven't launched yet. Anyone know of any alternatives and care to share their experiences?
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liscio
I've yet to have one of the "bad" problems with PayPal, but I'm always trying
to stay a step ahead of them when I can.

For instance, if you're expecting a higher-than-normal sales volume (e.g. a
launch day, version upgrade, promotion), it doesn't hurt to give their
Merchant Services department a phone call (the number I was given was
866-837-1851).

Be sure you ask for Merchant Services if you're not connected to them by
default—it's a whole other support organization from what I could gather on my
last phone call with them a month or so ago.

They may be taken aback by the reason for your call, but you can go over your
phone numbers and addresses with them to make sure they can get a hold of you
in the event that a fraud trigger is hit. If they can't speak with you, they
have no other choice but to shut you down until you call them.

You can also get them to put a note on your account about the expected volume
increase, so that when the activity does go into review, it may not be such a
harsh reaction (e.g. freezing withdrawals temporarily rather than totally
shutting down incoming funds.)

For the price of their service, the wide range of things you can do with their
APIs, and the support I've received thus far, there's not a whole lot left to
complain about IMO. Maybe my tune will change if I experience some of the
"trouble" you hear about online, but I think that the proactive approach I
describe above may help prevent that from ever happening.

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citricsquid
The reason Paypal are popular is because they offer something no other service
can. If you want the versatility and spread of Paypal then you're just going
to have to suck it up.

Yes, Paypal do sometimes have problems, but if you follow their rules and
regulations and don't build your business around them you should be okay. The
majority of horror stories are knee jerk reactions to an unfortunate situation
which are never reported on again when a resolution is found.

The reason Paypal have such over zealous fraud checking and don't hesitate to
lock accounts until they're 100% sure it's legit is because of how large of a
target they are for fraud and also because of how accountable they will be. If
someone sends me $10 and I run off with it, Paypal will have to pay out that
$10 from their own pocket to the customer, might be okay on a small scale but
at Paypals volume...

Personally I think the best method is to have a basic merchant account
(authorize, nochex etc) and also Paypal, use your merchant account as the
default credit card processor and also offer Paypal for those who either have
Paypal accounts or are only comfortable with Paypal. If you're smart about how
you use Paypal you'll be fine :)

~~~
ck2
PayPal locks legit accounts too, all the time, if they feel the type of
activity has simply changed/increased in nature. Then to get your money out
you have to prove to them otherwise. They will simply keep asking for more and
more information from you on purpose to try to make you give up.

And I would bet they have _never_ paid a dollar out of their own pocket to
cover fraud, they basically will close the accounts of both parties to cover
themselves or take "fees" out of the covered party's return for their
"protection service".

Never, ever, keep more than $100 in your PayPal account. You are begging for
trouble otherwise. Also if possible close the original checking account that
you tied to your PayPal account, because they will tap into it to reverse any
transaction at their will, without notice.

~~~
anthony_franco
Yeah, PayPal can be a pretty big pain. We've had our accounts locked out by
them a few times. But eventually they are satisfied and leave you alone.
Here's some general tips I'd follow if you do go down the PayPal route.

1) Use your full legal name when creating the account.

2) If you're creating the account for a company, make sure the owner of the
account is an officer of the company (CEO, Vice President, etc).

3) Have only one account. If you're creating an account for your business, and
you already have a personal account, you're gonna run into problems.

4) Make sure the mailing address you give is actually accessible. PayPal's
gonna mail a verification code to you once you start making a sizable amount.

And just in general, once you start getting money into your account, PayPal's
always gonna come knocking. At one point, PayPal prevented us from even
receiving payments. But eventually, after a while of working with them, they
got off our backs and we stopped having problems with them.

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csomar
My advice is to support as many gateway payments as possible. What you should
support are:

-PayPal: They are popular. You "must" support them because a huge % of your users will consider them as the only electronic payment system in the web.

-Credit Cards: Because they are even more popular and available in almost every citizen's pocket (we are speaking here of developed countries).

-Moneybookers: They are an alternative to PayPal. Don't underestimate its' power. It may take only 5% of user's share usage, but can be a valuable alternative if PayPal is down.

Have you considered such systems like fastspring? They offer a multiple
gateway solution and they take a % for that.

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reinierbutot
<http://www.ogone.co.uk/>

I am looking into this myself (but only doing business in The Netherlands) and
this seems to be one of the best solutions. For my purposes anyway.

~~~
bnoordhuis
Another happy Ogone customer here. They're not cheap but the API is versatile
enough and the support is quite alright.

For Dutch businesses: Ogone supports iDEAL and I think their transaction
overhead is actually lower than when you do business with iDEAL directly.

~~~
tav
Thanks for the endorsement. Is there a public link for their API
documentation?

Also, any chance you could elaborate on, or perhaps email me tav@espians.com
on the general pricing?

~~~
bnoordhuis
They don't have any public documentation but you can sign up for a free test
account and access the API docs from the control panel.

As to pricing, it depends on your transaction volume. The only link I can find
is in Dutch but it's relatively straight-forward (and maybe Google Translate
can help you out).

<http://www.internetkassa.com/ogone-abonnementen/>

------
barmstrong
For SAAS type subscriptions, I was pretty happy with Spreedly

<http://spreedly.com/>

One thing that is pretty cool is they let you be merchant account agnostic
(all CC's are stored in their own PCI compliant vault). So if Authorize.net
drops you or is being stupid, you can setup a different merchant account and
the entire thing is transparent from your customer's perspective.

------
cosmicray
About Google Checkout ... I've used both PayPal (~10 years) and GC (~3 years).
My view is that PP has a more robust dispute resolution system. Resolving a
dispute at GC is merely a matter of "Providing a positive customer experience"
(and doing a refund even if the customer is defrauding you). The GC process
(and dispute results) is very opaque.

~~~
nhebb
I'm not sure if they still do this, but I dropped Google Checkout several
years ago because they allowed the user to hide contact information from the
vendor. This may sound like a great privacy feature for the customer, but it
really made it a nightmare to support customers who I couldn't confirm were
actually my customers - especially if I needed to re-issue license keys.

------
mpclark
I've heard good things about SagePay in the UK, though haven't used it myself.
Have dropped PayPal because, though I understand chargebacks and fraud can
happen, I was not at all happy with the level of information provided (ie
almost none) when payments were held for investigation, then approved, then a
few days later yanked from my account. Am now using Barclays ePDQ because I
bank with Barclays, but the system is horrible to integrate, looks hideous,
and is expensive. But at least it isn't PayPal :)

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marquis
I have used Paypal with Payflow Pro since they bought the services from
Verisign. I have had absolutely no issues, and we process several high-value
transactions daily from international clients. However, we only do credit card
transactions, not direct Paypal transactions. I think this keeps Paypal out of
our transaction issues with clients, and if we get charge-backs (rare) we deal
directly with our Merchant bank which is alway dealt with in a way we find
reasonable.

------
abrudtkuhl
Dwolla <https://www.dwolla.com/default.aspx>

Peer to Peer payment processing system $.25 per transaction

~~~
bpmilne
Solid solution for US users but it is not available yet in the UK.

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ergo14
I'm looking for a solution where I can have recurring payments for my SAAS
startup. I'd like to charge in USD and/or EUR, but I'm based in Poland, and so
is my company.

I can't use google checkout (not present here), and I want to avoid resorting
to Paypal because of horror stories(actually one of my clients got permanently
suspended). Any other solutions anyone could recommend to me?

~~~
GeorgeRevutsky
Try Recurly combined with Paypal.

------
evilhackerdude
What about Chargify? <http://chargify.com/>

About other countries and currencies:
[http://support.chargify.com/faqs/general-questions/does-
char...](http://support.chargify.com/faqs/general-questions/does-chargify-
support-accepting-currencies-from-outside-the-us)

~~~
tav
As far as I can tell, you can only use Chargify in the UK if you have an
account with Barclays. And, on top, you still need to get hold of costly
payment gateways and merchant accounts...

~~~
rmoriz
recurly.com and spreedly.com have support for EUR/GBP and .EU based merchant
accounts

------
VMG
One thing about US-only services: I have read on multiple occasions that
Google Checkout is US-only and was surprised it was an option when I wanted to
donate to a OSS project from Germany. So it seems to depend on whether you use
it for incoming or outgoing transactions.

------
srhyne
Cheddargetter.com, wonderful API

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Apreche
I really just want to use Amazon, like Kickstarter does. However, ther are no
e-commerce packages that support Amazon out of the box. Shopify, BigCartel,
etc. All of them primarily support PayPal, and maybe support Google Checkout.

------
illumen
worldpay? Depends on what you are selling, and to what market(s). eg,
currencies are important, turnkey support for selling subscriptions, or
electronic products, or virtual currencies(some payment processors don't do
some of those). The fraud rate of your demographic(eg, products for teens in
HighCrimeCountry might have higher fraud than old ladies in LowCrimeCountry).
Some people only have paypal, and not credit cards too. There's so many
factors to give a good answer.

------
pbreit
If you want regular credit card processing, have a look at WorldPay. If you
want alternative payment processing, PayPal or Google might be good options.

------
steveplace
<https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/cba>

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alexbowman
AliPay is one to maybe watch. The leader in China they have announced plans to
expand internationally.

~~~
leftnode
I've been attempting to work with Alipay for my job for a while now. While
they are the Paypal equivalent in China, it's very difficult to work with
them.

First, they require a ton of documentation to become a registered business
with them. Their API is non-existent, and getting answers is difficult because
you either need to speak Chinese or use Google Translate. A lot.

While I'm sure it's great, it can be very frustrating.

------
DeusExMachina
www.fastspring.com

Easy to configure, neat interface, great support. And accepts paypal payments.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Agreed - had a great experience using FastSpring; hope to use them again once
another idea comes up :)

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sushrutbidwai
Realex payments?

Few other are - payvision.

Global players - Google checkout, Amazon checkout.

------
known
Perhaps you should talk to your bank. They might have a solution.

~~~
david_p
These are usualy the expensive kind of solutions ...

If you want 100% control over your money, you could use <http://paybox.com>,
they are located in france but I believe their solutions work worldwide.

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damir
I've heard people say good things about Plimus.com.

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SymbMeta
Square?

~~~
jonursenbach
You can't really use Square for internet transactions; you need an
iPhone/Android app to initiate and complete the purchase.

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david_p
google checkout maybe ?

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tomh-
moneybookers.com

~~~
ulf
While they are an alternative and available in UK, I would NOT recommend them.
The technical integration via iFrame has so many pitfalls, especially for non-
technical customers, that you will go through endless trouble. Furthermore,
their fraud protection does not really work, and processing chargebacks was a
total bitch. Disclaimer: I once used them for a german e-commerce site. We
pretty fast switched to a different service provider (Wirecard).

~~~
rmoriz
my #1 for Recurring Credit Card Payment in Europe is currently:
<http://recurly.com> \+ <http://WireCard.com>

As <http://spreedly.com> wants to support WireCard in the future, too this
might be a very interesting alternative. too

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otwixto
www.escrow.com

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trustfundbaby
No.

