Ask YC: That Step Before Profit.

[donw]

I've been looking around at options for collecting payment from customers, and the number of options is staggering. PayPal, Amazon, Google Checkout, various payment gateways, dedicated merchant accounts, thugs armed with baseball bats, and so on.

I'm probably not the only person here who has had to spend a dizzying amount of time in researching payment and billing options, so methinks it might be time to ask all the other business-minded people here at Hacker News: What methods have you used for that crucial step of 'Getting money from the customer'?

[petercooper]

At my last startup we used PayPal exclusively. Why? Because we're in the UK and all our customers were in the US. This was less than ideal but worked surprisingly well - the money certainly came in and we only had a handful of "we won't use PayPal" comments from customers.

More generally, I've seen startups using authorize.net a lot recently - for example: http://letsfreckle.com/ - so they must have options for fresh startups.

I'd be interested to see any recommendations for the UK though. I'm planning to launch something in 2009 and will be using PayPal again unless I can find a better option. I'd rather have a more slick sales process, but the alternatives I've seen that can get me up and running fast in the UK for selling to US customers haven't been that great :-(

[jaxn]

I am in the process of implementing Authorize.Net CIM for http://statzen.com.

We are a subscription based service so I think it makes sense.