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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from 
  customers who don't have credit cards?

If a customer doesn't have a credit card or a debit card that your payment gateway accepts, you deal with them the same way you deal with customers who don't have computers.

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In the western world, people without credit or debit cards are such a small portion of the population that this policy of ignoring such users is worthwhile. In developing countries however, there are many services that aim to bridge this gap. I dont know how good they are, or how successful they will be, but people are certainly trying to access this market.

Examples (no affiliations): http://gharpay.in/ - Home cash pickup; https://www.itzcash.com/ - Prepaid Cash card; Mobile Money services in Africa such as M-Pesa - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Actually, as a student in Germany, most of people I know don't have or want a credit card (which is a major annoyance with Google Checkout, since they accept _only_ credit card payment). That's - depending on your product of course - not that small a market. I would argue that this is the case in other countries, too.

My girlfriend's online business accepts bank transfers if customers can't pay online. "Go to this bank and deposit $X to account Y".

Maybe it doesn't scale too well, but at her business scale it still works for the exception cases and money is money. If you're biggest problem is too many people depositing money to your bank account, that's not a bad problem.

http://www.polipayments.com/ seems pretty good for this.

When you go to make a payment, it logs into your bank account and does the transfer for you. So you get an instant receipt, without having to wait for the money to show up in the merchants bank account.

Apart from the obvious problem of letting third party software have full access to your bank account.

It's a breach of my bank's terms of service, so I would be responsible for fraud if I used it. No thanks.

We have a staggering number of customer who pay us through PayPal because they don't have a credit card or a debit card which clears through Mastercard/Visa (which is the standard in most countries).

Cell phone. You see it a lot in Africa, where few people have credit cards but many have cheap cell phones.

That works in the US, but it does not work internationally.

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