
SaaS for US customers but located offshore - alisyed7
What are the options for a SaaS firm thats offshore based but targeting US customers in terms of engaging with merchant gateways?<p>a. Can an international firm signup with the likes of Paypal Merchant, Authorize.net etc and charge recurring US dollars on CC's?
b. If US registration is mandatory, is there an EASY and straightforward way to register a firm in the US to offer SaaS with no US presence? 
c. Is there a third country (avoiding the term tax haven!) with lax Tax laws and registration ability that can achieve direct selling with US customers and be completely ligit?<p>Thanks
Ali
http://www.7vals.com
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patio11
There are many varieties of "offshore" for this question. I am not routinely
inconvenienced by being an American living in Japan with regards to charging
for things. If you're a Nigerian living in Nigeria... things are going to be a
wee bit more difficult.

One does not practically or legally _need_ a physical or corporate presence in
the US to charge cards. Of the available options, I use Paypal to charge
credit cards -- they had the least involved process to get a Paypal account
(Paypal Website Payments standard + Paypal premier account) years ago, and I
bootstrapped that into their I-can't-believe-its-not-a-merchant-account
(Paypal website payments pro + business account) after a few years of doing
(relatively) significant volumes through Paypal proper. That has been
impressively painless.

Privilege escalation is, by and large, the easiest way to get into the US
banking system. As soon as you're in a bank's systems and they have their Know
Your Customer checkbox ticked next to your application, your odds of not
getting held up by fraud review for the next product you add go up _greatly_.
(This is why the tech incubator I used to work at would set up anyone going to
the US with personal checking/investment accounts at US multinational
financial firms. As soon as you have a foot in the door, everything else gets
easier.)

Understand that businesses do not refuse to do business with foreigners
because they enjoy screwing with you -- it is strictly risk-mitigation. There
are a variety of things you can do to reduce perceived risk. In general,
things which tend to indicate you're a "real" business tend to work. (Tax
forms are practically magic spells -- they look official, it is virtually
impossible to second-guess their contents, and the IRS will virtually _never_
tell you "Piss off, we don't want your money.")

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henrikschroder
Our company is based in Denmark, which means we can't use Authorize.net or the
real PayPal services, or any of the commonly recommended services.

However, we're using a local bank, a local payment processor, and a local
payment gateway, and it works just fine. We can do recurring charges on the
major credit cards in whatever currency we want.

The one thing that doesn't work is AMEX, for some incredibly stupid reason we
were only allowed to charge those cards in DKK which didn't make any sense to
us, so we promptly cancelled that contract.

So my advice is to investigate your local options as well. Ask your bank what
processors there are, and ask your processors what gateways there are.

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lautis
PayPal can be used internationally, but it has some caveats.

Simple recurring billing works quite well, except that you have no control
over the subscription. Only thing you can do is to cancel it via PayPal
interface. Multiple plans become quickly painful.

There's also Adaptive Payments API, which is available for non-US companies.
PayPal doesn't really trust you: subscriptions are limited to one year in
length, but you have the control of when and how much is billed (within limits
of the "preapproval"). Adaptive Payments API is quite painful to use and is
challenging from UX point of view. It's probably cheaper to incorporate in the
US and use some other merchant gateway than to implement PayPal Adaptive
Payments in your software.

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marcamillion
Here is a wonderful post that details exactly this for you:

[http://blog.freshdesk.com/how-to-incorporate-a-us-
corporatio...](http://blog.freshdesk.com/how-to-incorporate-a-us-corporation-
from-outs)

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cloudsafe
Paypal is very expensive in terms of fees! We opted for a local card
processor. They all offered us less than 2% for every transaction and a fixed
monthly fee for the service. C

Compare that with Paypal! Paypal is great for quick and easy implementation -
but at the end you pay a lot more..

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ig1
PayPal and 2Checkout seem to be the two popular options.

Depending on your country you can probably find a local merchant account that
will let you bill in USD, Chargify have a list of non-US merchant account
providers which they've worked with in the past.

