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Comment by tzaman | Hacker News Reader

That's actually great news, why would Europeans have to wait for an undisclosed date Stripe gives (or rather, doesn't give).

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I agree, it's been a long time coming. Might be a pain for Stripe but competition is great for everyone else.

I was initially appalled when I first read about the Samwar clone factory. Now I agree, in cases like this they're filling a gap in the market.

The only gap is, that Recurly and Spreedly were not able to tell the EU founders that their service is available and working perfectly fine with European payment gateways.

They all have JS and REST-APIs and a lot more:

- http://recurly.com/

- http://spreedly.com/

Nope.

Although Recurly could be technically used in Europe, it generates invalid invoices (at least here in Spain).

We are switching away from it, and personally, I do not recommend it anymore.

VAT is a tricky area with a lot of special rules - this is why most recurring billing providers don't take it on.

After hearing additional requirements from dmarinoc and a few other merchants located in Spain, we have since implemented a solution for merchants using VAT.

Diego - I'll follow up with you directly about the changes :)

Rachel - Recurly Support

well. you could do your own invoicing if you're not satisfied with the pdf they generate. Stripe and Paymill don't do invoicing, too.

Ouch, that's a big minus from the point of view of an European company - not having to look for another app to generate invoices or futz around with generating your own was nice.

The specific issue with Recurly that we had is that they silently changed their platform to perform VIES validation on all VAT numbers. While this makes sense for transactions with entities from outside of the merchant's country, validating VAT numbers for German-to-German or Spanish-to-Spanish transactions is silly. Not only do such transactions always get charged VAT, but it's possible that a given string is a valid VAT number and yet is not present in VIES. Since you will pay (and therefore charge the customer) VAT for same-country transactions anyway, you don't care if the number that the customer provided is valid according to VIES.

This change has cost us a little wave of support tickets and an ugly workaround, in preparation for moving off Recurly.

I firmly believe that a company that gets online recurring payments right in Europe will become a money-printing machine in no time.

Did I understand you correctly that:

1. Recurly is right to add VIES validation for out of country transactions.

2. They shall not implement this feature for in country transactions.

???

Those are special cases for Germany and Spain (I implemented that stuff for a german webshop that has to make the same exception). I'd guess it's the same for Spain.

German customers who buy in a german webshop have to pay VAT and then claim it back later in their tax return, because the german tax authorities don't allow that exemption beforehand.

That's right if you use "should" instead of "shall".

Interesting. What are you replacing Recurly with?

Still evaluating. But we definitely don't want to stay there.

Tip: Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/)

Braintree are yet to publicly launch their service internationally.

Yeah, but the problem is you still need a gateway, whereas with Stripe/Paymill, everything is included. Luckily, Braintree now supports EU as well.

You want a local, independent gateway and acquirer anyway (same jurisdiction, language, support…) which both Spreedly.com and Recurly.com support with http://www.WireCard.com/

In bad circumstances you don't want to lose all your payment infrastructure e.g. if paymill or stripe go out of business/have issues. That's why dealing with 2 parties may look odd but in the end it is worth the effort.

If you have problems paying the 50-100$ monthly fee, then your business is the problem. Not your payment partner.

(WireCard is a profitable, public credit-card processing bank, the chances that they go out of business is much lower than VC driven payment startups. See http://www.wirecard.com/investor-relations/ for details. They do CC-payments for Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa. >11 Billion Euro/year)

If you have problems paying the 50-100$ monthly fee, then your business is the problem.

Why should a scrappy startup pay an extra 50-100$ when it doesn't have to?

Why should a scrappy startup deal with the horrible paperwork of payment gateways on top of the horrible integration, when it doesn't have to?

You make no sense.

Seconded. I run an ecommerce site that has more than 100k in sales per year but only 10 to 20% go through credit cards. I sure will not file endless paperwork and do long integration just to move away from paypal. But I signed up for paymill in a second because it will provide what I really need (a nicer payment process) and spare me a lot of hassle. The processing fees on 20k is 580 for Paymill so it would even be cheaper. If the shop grows tenfold then sure lets integrate with the XML over fax machine API of a real bank.

If Stripe were to go out of business, it wouldn't really impact your use of Spreedly. They just charge the gateway, not store information there, so it's not a big deal.

I agree with the last statement, however, the chance of Stripe/Paymill going out of business pretty much equals that of Wirecard going haywire.

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