Hacker News Reader

Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

At Spreedlycore we support 40 + payment gateways. (our target audience are developers/applications that need to work with more than one payment gateway) No one's asked us about PayMill yet. It'll be interesting if they do.

It worries me when the first two sentences contradict each other: "Paymill enables you to offer credit card payments on your website within a short time. There is no waiting time" Which one is it?

I hope it's the real deal because the world needs it (we deal with a lot of non US developers around payments all the time so know the pain). 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.

Lastly looks like just Visa/MC. No AMEX or Discover which isn't the terrible but worth noting vs other options. (AMEX is more expensive so not having it I'm sure helped them get to 2.9%)

View on HN

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. ;)

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.

Thanks for the clarification.

> 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've never seen Discover either and it's quite normal to see AMEX not being accepted at small retailers in the UK

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.

They do have pre-authorization: https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/documentation-3/reference/api-...

It says you can trigger the capture to fire a bit later, though you'd probably want that to happen when you ship an order -- which you can do with the API by creating a new Transaction from your preauthorization: https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/documentation-3/reference/api-...

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!

> 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.)

Yeah but I think that's what they want you to believe. I think it's cleverly worded. "There is no waiting time" Stop - ok, in this space we all know what the biggest change has been recently. No waiting time to get a merchant account any more. "........to begin the integration process" Ohhhh. Still I'll wait to be corrected by someone who finds it is immediate - maybe it is true.

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

> 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.

At Braintree, most new merchants are automatically approved to start processing without any human review. In some cases, an application will need an underwriter to take a look at it before it's fully approved. The advantage of this approach is that we won't tell you that you're good to go, but then shut you down a few weeks or months down the road after you've already started processing.

The UK process (at least when we investigated it) and I assume the rest of the recently added countries is still very much send us more paperwork then a bank ever will ask for to a black hole email (or sftp) at Braintree and say a pray.

This is no worse then any of the other payment processors in the UK but hardly the frictionless option that is in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com