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Comment by dfischer | Hacker News Reader

What's an alternative to PayPal then?

Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and other cc processors. Or get a merchant account.

Most CC processors are much more expensive if you're only dealing with a small number of sales, they're only worth using if you're beyond a certain size which most mISVs won't be.

Pretty much every big payment processor is viable so long as you have a US Bank account into which you withdraw your sales revenue—except a lot of us live outside of Bushland and thus the only option is either using a local bank/merchant account (expensive, complex, slow-moving, don't understand new technology, poor interface, etc) or paypal.

ApparentSoft is a developer based in Israel, like me. They probably opted to use PayPal because PayPal recently opened up the ability to withdraw directly to an Israeli Bank account -- something which all the ohter entrants on this list cannot do (with the possible exception of 2CO, haven't looked at them).

2CO can do international wire transfers.

I use them as a secondary account because some of my customers refuse to use PayPal, and 2CO really sucks compared to PayPal. They haven’t frozen my account, but their UI is crap, their fees are higher, there is delay before payment appears in my account, they keep a “reserve” when they do payouts, etc.

What about best alternatives for merchants outside of the US/Europe?

Would be glad to hear an alternative. I havent been able to find a payment processor for Mexico.

I've never understood what's the difference between a credit card processor and a merchant account? I've read up on them but I'm new to this and still don't really see what I should be looking for.

Guys in the article recommend FastSpring.

I use both PayPal and Fastspring as our payment processors (Fastspring is there to give customers an option besides paypal). Fastspring is excellent customer service, and their "springboard" interface is very nice. Fees are a bit high, but they do offer additional services on top of what you can get from PayPal.

I've built merchant processor plugins for several different systems (2checkout, worldpay, alertpay) and NONE have as nice of an API as PayPal (both regular IPN and their PayPal Pro NVP API).

We've been selling through PayPal for 7 years now without issue, and we usually process from 2 to 3 hundred transactions per month.

"I use both PayPal and Fastspring as our payment processors (Fastspring is there to give customers an option besides paypal)."

I wonder if this is something of a best practice, to have two payment processors running live. Besides giving customers a choice, you also have the other one already up, running and accepting money if paypal or whoever freezes you.

It absolutely is. Not only can you lose your access to a payment method at any time (even a merchant account), but the service/API might be offline. Authorizenet suffered a big outage not too many months ago. The smart companies had other payment options available and simply took away the Authnet powered method until the service was restored, the companies that didn't plan so well were essentially not doing business.

Yes - this is one reason why we do this - it's basically a "backup" plan for our merchant processing. Either of the options can be turned off in a template in just a few seconds if needed. We also do it however since some users are vehemently "anti PayPal" and won't buy anything through PayPal - we don't want to lose those customers, so an alternate option is essential.

I prefer Bank-To-Bank transactions.

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