Need to process payments?
ycombinator.posterous.com
ycombinator.posterous.com
Any startup who wants a wide open market?
We just finished setting up a merchant account for one of our products and that process is a huge productivity bottleneck. There are a number of solutions out there today for startups who want to process payments (chargify comes to mind) but they all pretty much have the same problem - having to deal with a merchant account setup. If that takes weeks, the setup takes weeks too, even if the new gateway needs only a few minutes to get you started on their end.
There are a number of us in this exact situation and it is a GIANT pain point. This market is basically untapped... if you can/want to tackle non-US payment processing, you will make a killing.
We ended up going with Paylane (merchant account setup took about a month - which is insane). Worldpay was another option but they required people who wanted to pay for our service to have an account on theirs (seriously).
He needs to do card processing but only certain times out of the year. He goes to conventions and sells merchandise, etc and wants to be able to take credit cards but the monthly & inactivity fees would wipe him out.
So far all I've seen that could fix this potentially is Square, but they have yet to ship out their swiping widgets to use to try it out.
If someone can find a way to make it affordable to process cards "When you need it" it might be huge.
Back in the late 90s, RedHat bought a small company in Pittsburgh which made a rather awesome product called CCVS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCVS) which allowed you to talk directly to the credit card companies, circumventing the merchant accounts.
My employer started using CCVS to provide direct credit card services at the time, and I wrote a PHP module which shipped for a few years as part of PHP core for using it.
Sadly, RedHat discontinued the product ; I'm not sure if anyone else has stepped up to do something similar but it was incredibly easy to use, powerful and got around the absurd restrictions most merchant accounts provide.
I'm assuming Square is talking directly to the CC clearing houses, which is how they keep their costs reasonable.
"Your reader will ship soon"
-Create an account (Free)
-Start accepting payments at a slightly higher percent (3.5%?)
-Percentage goes down as volume increases
End the negotiation, setup fees, etc that are stuck in this archaic business please :(
To get a decent rate for our salon, we had to project ridiculous revenue and pray that we came close to it to even get a reasonable rate.
We're paying 1.9% right now on card present w/ a $100 monthly fee and doing $45k revenue per month at our salon. So it's working for us at the moment.
I'm definitely interested in Square and as they mature, we'll go through the whole 'credit check' etc process.
I know why they ask for that info (to cover their asses), but it was enough for me to avoid them.
A really simple (and fast!) application process could be a very big selling point. People are impulsive, and when evaluating processors I'd probably go for the easiest/fastest all other things being roughly equal.
"Start processing credit cards today (really, seriously)!"
Large businesses are run by processes and paperwork.
An example: "With increased revenue, the merchant bank became concerned with the increase in liability. So, the bank closed the merchant account." And because they couldn't get their credit card data back, they had to ask all their customers to enter their payment information again. http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/credit-card-portability/
Additional Info:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...
http://whiteelephantmedia.com/
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/paypal-reserve...
Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
I see FastSpring responded in this thread that recurring billing is coming, so maybe that will become a viable option:
So it might be wise to for Braintree to loosen up the fees a bit for promising young companies - an incubator program for payments of sorts. At least for the YC/HN community :)
Though, honestly, looking at their pricing, Braintree ins't crazy expensive even for a company that gets $0 sales out of the gate... $99 initial setup, $35 monthly, $10 for cc storage, $75 as a zero sales "penalty". Setup delay seems to be an issue here as well, but that just seems like Braintree doing its diligence.
If we fail then we stop using Braintree, authorize or paypal (then use them again on the next startup). But if we succeed, we will continue to be a customer (and recommend them to our friends on HN) for a long, long time.
Seems like a slam-dunk to me.
For a long time, I had the perception, which, I believe, was the correct one, that PayPal == Amateur in the minds of your potential customers.
I believe that this is no longer the case. Well, it is the case, but it no longer matters. I still think "small time", when I see a PayPal button, but now I also think "trusted" and "easy refund". These tend to make the "small time" thought less of an issue.
I also think that it's gradually losing it's "small time", "amateur" connotations among savvy web users. For non-savvy web users, which in reality, is the larger population, it never mattered anyway, and I agonized over all of this for nothing.
For quite awhile both wordpress.com and stumblupon both were using paypal as their payment method for buying credits.
But PayPal is also not particularly great. The UI is agonizingly slow (I can only imagine how painful it would be to use if we were doing thousands or millions of transactions per month instead of hundreds). Their response time on payment processing is also slow...slow enough to confuse our shop sometimes.
The good things about PayPal are its better fraud management tools (which you have to pay extra for), its pervasive support in shopping carts (though Payments Pro is a little more rare), and its really comprehensive online interface. I used to have to send faxes for everything with the old processor, which was just ridiculous. I can do anything online with PayPal.
I also love that PayPal does everything. I hated never even knowing who to call when we had problems with the old service. There were three web interfaces for three different companies (Authorize.net, merchant services bank, and some sort of reporting service that I never could figure out) that did god knows what, and we were being billed by all of them. All of them had different points of contact and different procedures for dealing with issues (and issues pretty much never got dealt with), and I never, in years of dealing with them, figured out who was responsible for what. PayPal is the gateway, the merchant services provider, and everything else. When I'm confused about something, or need to issue a refund or whatever, I login to one place and all the data is there.
I also haven't been able to figure out how to use recurring payments at PayPal. But, that's probably a failing on my part. I'm kinda dumb sometimes, when accounting and money and such comes up.
But, I definitely don't think PayPal is the last word in payment processing. If there were something better, faster, or cheaper, I'd happily switch (any one of those three things would do it, assuming it's equal on the others).
It's a really hard market to tackle, since so much of it is regulatory compliance (both private and government regulations) and interacting with really old-fashioned industries (banks modernized about 30 years ago, and seemingly decided that was a one-time expense that they never needed to do again).
What they really mean is that the interchange rate that your transaction qualified for is worse than the rate that they set to be your default or "qualified" rate. http://transfs.com/blog/what-is-interchange-again/
These billing tiers are a problem because there is no standard on what is "qualified" and what is "unqualified", it varies between processors and between customers within the same processor. http://transfs.com/blog/tiered-pricing-for-merchant-accounts...
There is a way to solve those billing tier ambiguities (which never are in the favor of the businessowner) - its called interchange plus pricing. Insist upon it, every processor can do it, for any size business.
Basically interchange is the wholesale rate that visa/mc charge the processor. In an interchange-plus pricing scheme the processor pass those charges on to you and explicitly disclose the markup you are paying above that wholesale rate. It's the best way to ensure no funny business is going on with your rates - http://transfs.com/blog/why-you-should-want-interchange-plus...
Only accept interchange plus or a no-downgrade flat percentage (like Paypal offers) - it will save you money and aggravation.
Obviously, I've got a lot of hostility about the payments industry. Switching to PayPal (which took less than 24 hours to setup, and took just a few minutes of my time for filling out the application) was a breath of fresh air over Authorize.net, where I had to deal with a mentally retarded reseller (I'm not being facetious; retardation is the only explanation for some of the questions she asked and her grasp of the English language, despite being a native speaker) for three weeks to get things working.
Given that PayPal only charges 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction for businesses with > $10K in sales, it seems to me that it is increasingly difficult for any merchant services provider to compete with PayPal in the online space, given the high basic interchange rate.
The added benefits of not having to deal with the cost and complexity of PCI compliance and a separate credit card gateway has made us decide to switch to PayPal.
Also, one big concern in my startup is chargebacks. Does this service help me with chargeback protection at all?
More generally: how will they make my life better?
It's also not exactly the type of product we're selling. There are some subtle (but important) differences between Clickbank's target product and our product.
Interestingly, adding a really expensive product (about $1000) to our store provided a nice mechanism for catching fraud. Nearly 100% of our fraudulent orders purchase the really expensive product right off the bat, while most of our legitimate purchasers of that product buy a less expensive one first, and then upgrade to the more expensive version later. So, I automatically flag orders for the most expensive product, and interact with the customer personally before letting the order go through. This is also a pain in the ass, but it does reduce the number of chargebacks.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=71792
This is all to say, credit card processing is incredibly complicated. Here's another quote, directly from the federal government [1]:
"MasterCard wants to hear about merchants who break their rules. Send the name and address and an account of what happened to MasterCard International, c/o Radio City Station, P. O. Box 1288, New York, NY 10101. The merchant's bank will get a stiff letter, ordering it to investigate and bring the offending store into line - or pay a $2,000 fine.
Visa enforces the same rules as MasterCard. "When we hear about a violation, we ask the bank that signed the merchant to get together with the merchant and see that the practice is stopped," Visa representative states. To report a merchant, send a letter to the bank that issued your Visa card.
American Express also prohibits merchants from asking for IDs. "All a merchant is supposed to do is take an imprint, make sure the signature matches and swipe the card through the terminal, to get authorization."
I'm not trying to build a big business, just some side stuff where any time spent on payment processing is a huge impediment. I don't want a merchant account. Subscriptions would be nice.
For somebody willing to drop 30% (or even 3%-5%) on a payment processing solution, there are lots of them.
But, I bet we could convince Steve Jobs to create "Apple Payments", and charge you 30%, and I bet there are a lot of people who would do it.
http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...
It's strictly private and requires no commitment of any kind. Basically it's like Kayak for payments.
However, we don't do international yet, so probably can't help the original poster. International payments are really hard, there are many fewer options in most foreign countries.
Even in Canada and UK the number of merchant account providers is many fewer than in the US, giving the customer less choice and enabling the providers to maintain more of their archaic practices.
Sorry, in today's world this just won't cut it ...
Do you need an authorize.net or similar account?
Do they handle subscriptions?
What are their rates like?
When do they expect to be available outside the US?
BTW - don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting they have a bad product. I'm really curious how they can make payment processing developer focused!
All in all though, I'm pretty impressed with Chargifys offering.
This is not supported by Chargify yet, they only charge for items at the beginning of a period. If we were using a simple recurring subscription for this and not quantify based model this wouldn't be an issue, because they do offer prorated upgrades and downgrades for recurring subscriptions.
Nothing overly complicated here, just have to hack around some of the current limitations of the platform.
Our customers even occasionally asked for PayPal specifically because they trust PayPal's refund process, but maybe not our money back guarantee.
I sell a small software application that goes for $7. After trying a few places I've settled on PayPal micropayments which charges 5c + 5%, which comes out to about 7.5% for me.
I'd be interested in anyone that could give good micropayment rates.
I'm really curious how they plan to do it though - since it seems like you'd essentially have to start your own bank to streamline the process. Too much regulation for that. What work around did they find??