Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal, part 1/2

Payments is a really exciting space at the moment, its being disrupted at an impressive rate and it seems a new provider pops up almost every day. While its great to read this story I believe to a certain extent at the moment its better the devil you know, especially if you are an established business.

I always recommend PayPal to our merchants, not only is it the quickest way to send and receive money online its also backed up by one of the largest payment networks in the world. Also lots of people have money in paypal accounts they would like to spend, not everyone links it back to their bank account. For E-Commerce sites you can expect to loose about 10% of sales by not offering PayPal. However, I appreciate its not for everyone.

For alternatives, here I think it really depends on the size and type of your business. If you are doing any type of volume the only serious way to receive payments online is via a Payment Service Provider (PSP), and there are millions of them. You can seriously reduce your transaction costs and often you get some pretty weapons grade anti fraud protection thrown in. Unfortunately setting up a PSP isn't as simple as it sounds, its a two stage process starting with a Merchant Account. This space is pretty dominated by the traditional banks so get ready for a little red tape. Once you have your Merchant Account the PSP slice is normally fairly painless.

With regards to Stripe, I'd personally give any startup in this space some time to debug and increase transactions before you trust them with your business.

Nice read.

Can you name that German company? Curious to know.

Interesting read. I didn't realize how lucky I am to be in the U.S. when it comes to payment services. PayPal got such a huge clout!

Nicely done. Keen to get a decent solution for Europe too. What a gap in the market.

Will be keeping an eye out for part 2.

At first I was excited as I thought you were based in Japan and you were going to give insight about payments in the Japanese market. Great post, nonetheless. Does anyone have any good info on payment options in Japan outside of PayPal. I'm aware of E-context, SBI, and Digital Check. I would greatly appreciate any anecdotes, horror stories, or recommendations of other payment options in Japan.

I understand why you prefer to move away from Paypal, however, why don't you show Paypal on the subscribe page? There is just that 1 small blurb on the front page.

congrats. How about refunds and bank transfer fees? Do they have stripe like integration? Is it necessary to have a SSL certificate?

In recent years, it's been interesting to watch the rise of Dwolla (https://www.dwolla.com/) as an alternative payment network. It charges nothing for under $10 transactions, and only $0.25 for any transaction over $10, no matter how large it is. The only drawback is that, for now, it only works in the US.

If this switch works for me, and I can finally be free of my PayPal taskmasters, I'll be subscribing to your candy service!