PayMill, Stripe clone, rolls out silently across Europe

Why do you think developers should proceed with caution? They don't seem malevolent to me. Perhaps you question their methods, which is legitimate, but if you have any other information apart from that, I would like to hear it.

Additionally, I don't know if I can criticise their model. Yes, it's not very innovative, but on the other hand you can think of it as a outsourced European development team for US-based startups. They know the market, the language(s), the problems. They do the development work and then if the original startup wants to buy the product, they can. Who knows, perhaps it might even end up being not much more expensive than setting up the infrastructure and acquiring the knowledge required to operate in the EU. It might also serve as a test case: "is service X really going to work in the EU?". They take the risk that something might not work.

As an EU-based developer (who never used any of their products. yet?), I also think it's valuable for us (EU-based developers). Instead of waiting for startup X to get their act together, they offer us an alternative, which then later might be merged with the original product.

As a side note, there is a bit of a unintentional Schadenfreude to be found in this article as well. Since it's 6 - 7 months old, their investments in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon doesn't look so hot anymore as it did back then. Maybe they should avoid the investment side of things.

Edit: grammar

Stripe is no available in Europe. I don’t think there is anything wrong with creating something that works here instead of waiting.

It's a mis-nomer that they frequently end up selling to the US company they cloned. Ebay and Groupon are about the only two examples.

Stripe would never, ever, ever acquire a clone like this. First, because the notion is already rare. But more overwhelming is Stripe's intense focus on creating its own culture and building its own stuff.

People keep saying "Stripe, come to Europe!" and "Why isn't there something like Stripe in Europe." A competent company with a track record of success finally builds a good approximation of the Stripe experience for Europe, so why should developers be cautious? Have they shut down companies when they haven't been acquired?

Oliver Samwer's response to the negativity being circled about him. http://www.idea-lab.org/videos

Also, I think it's a bit unfair to reduce the brothers to a "copy-cat" title. This happens everywhere, its just that they are the most successful at it. There are a lot of really cool tech companies in the valley that are relevant to non-english-speaking countries and developing ones but these countries don't fully benefit because the originators of the ideas pay no special attention to this countries. Mere providing different language translations does not breakdown the different albeit subtle differences between different cultures.

I think the samwers should be commended for what they do especially for their German market.

Yeah, and it was about time they did Stripe!

What's the point of supporting both Greece and Turkey but not the other part of Cyprus? Just wondering.

It seems like someone forgot Belgium (again).

Note that the standard form of payment in Poland is wire transfer. There are gateways for it, like przelewy24.pl or payu.pl.

Nobody pays online with a credit card.

I'm very sorry for the translation problems. We are working to solve these, but we would appreciate if you could send us an email on support@paymill.com if you find something wrong or ambiguous.

But a small correction: we support the local currency of your company. If you are based in the UK, you'll be able to accept GBP. If you need support for other European currencies, you can contact us and we can certainly look into it.

About the PCI compliance: you don't have to be PCI compliant, for one reason: the payment data never reaches your server. Our javascript bridge solution takes care of sending the data directly to our payment servers (which are PCI compliant), so you don't have to be.

I'm not sure what you mean by not being frictionless for UK companies. Is this about the points above? If not, please do let us know what your concerns are :-)

> contradict

It seems like is saying the amount of time required by the developer is small and that you don't have to wait for approval/activation. (i.e. if it was a process it would be both fast and cpu-bound.)

> But Stripe hasn't nailed it and Braintree couldn't nail the "immediate sign up" outside of the US so I too will wait to hear if it's all that much different.

Correction: Braintree hasn't nailed it even inside US, despite reports otherwise. Even though you can sign up and get started with a developer account immediately, there is a human underwriter who looks at your account and activates production. This process might take lesser time now, but its not automated (like Stripe) and some people might get rejected on the way.

This step is the key value proposition for me. If Braintree or Paymill doesn't work like that, then they are not comparable to Stripe.

About the contradiction: you are right, it sounds a bit strange in English. We'll correct that. But what we mean is: you can start integrating the solution right away in "test mode", no need to wait till your activation is processed. In a couple days, your activation is processed and you can start receiving money for real.

> No AMEX or Discover which isn't the terrible but worth noting vs other options

For what it's worth, AMEX is uncommon in my EU country (and I say that as someone who uses AMEX) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's just as rare throughout the EU. I have literally never seen a Discover card.

I didn't know about you, this looks really interesting, I will give it a try, thanks.

Hi jusben1369,

a guy from our business team will contact you in the next days. Looks like a cool service you're offering! :)

We're thinking about AMEX and it could be another possible step in our v3. Actually we want to fix some minor bugs, our blog will updated within the next 1-2 weeks so you can stay tuned on English as well.

We actually didn't have the time to update our blog regularly regarding our European rollout. ;)

The lack of AMEX and Discover seems irrelevant to me. The lack of local cards however is a major issue for some European countries, depending on what you sell. If I where to use Paymill, I would still need someone to handle payments on local Danish cards.

From the look of the API is also seems like Paymill wouldn't be of any use if you ship physical products. Some European countries don't allow you to charge the customers card until the goods are actually shipped. This mean that you do need to be able to reserve the money and later do a "capture".

I love the simplicity of solutions like Stripe and Paymill, but I really don't see them be all that useful. That might of cause be because I'm in the business of shipping physical products in small geographic location.

EDIT: Just noticed Dankort being supported by Spreedlycore, awesome.

I am from the UK and just finished integrating Spreedly Core with a site I developed on Friday. It was a painless process and made interfacing with the traditional merchant account much easier. I would highly recommend it!

> It worries me when the first two sentences contradict each other:

I don't think that's necessarily true. The service lets you get payment processing up on your site in a short time. There is no waiting period to get an account set up to receive payments. It makes sense, its just not super specific.

I wonder why they require you to "apply" for a merchant account, when Stripe just lets you get started ASAP.

This is nothing but good news, anything that makes accepting payments easier is a god send. If Stripe were gone tomorrow, how more difficult would our lives be?

Sorry to hear that, but the activation process is unfortunately needed. That said, you can still start right away integrating our solution into your app. If you decide to indeed use our solution, you can just ask for the activation and in about 2 business days you'll be able to accept "live" payments.

It's true, the motto of HN is that ideas are nothing, execution is everything.

Yes the Samwise brothers outright steal ideas, but if you object then go and out-execute them in Europe. If you can't do that and the competition was fair, then the market has found a better solution. The only other path is in mandating a monopoly

This is a too narrow view. Africa leads with mobile phone banking (use your phone as a wallet and transfer funds and be able to cash out), Russia and CIS have viable cardless electronic money (you deposit money into electronic kiosks at shops and molls and then pay for goods and services via interwebs or from mobile), China has I guess everything we can imagine and more.

If your business accepts credit card payments, you must be PCI compliant.

Anybody involved with credit cards needs to be "compliant" The question is not yes or no but always around "Scope" Solutions that effectively use hosted payment pages (or even better in some ways a transparent redirect) so that the card data don't touch your servers usally allow you to just complete a SAQ-A (a self assessment one or two pager) So you must always be compliant but something like this (Stripe, Braintree etc) allows you to minimize scope to the SAQ-A level typically. (Caveats apply. You could build the best application in the world but if your support people start taking credit cards over the phone to help out customers who are struggling and 'set them up' you of course broaden your scope immediately so common sense still applies)

You can use Stripe for that.

Your company needs to be registered in one of the countries we support. Other than that, payments can come from any country.

Sorry, but what kind of license are you talking about? In order to use Paymill, you just need to have a company registered in one of the countries we are present (31, at the moment).

I was blown away by that too. Then it made sense considering it's Rocket behind it!

Nope, we also offer currencies which are supported in your country as well as USD/EUR and other way round, if you contact us directly at support@paymill.com.

I didn't get that far, but I did notice that their blog is in German and hasn't been updated for over a month.

There are a lot of questions still to be answered before I'd go anywhere near this service for a UK company...

We're working on that, thanks for the hint. We noticed that problem on wednesday, should be fixed at the beginning of the next week (from 12th on).

Alternatively you can hit our website with paymill.com without entering https in your URL.

Looks like half backed

Bootstrap buttons don't look that bad. What really matters is the quality of the service and APIs.

I'm sorry, what? Relevance?