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Comment by anuaitt | Hacker News Reader

It is difficult to charge money from India as Individuals, paypal does not accept money for India nowadays and it is near to impossible to attach a international payment gateway. I thought of donation as well but again paypal issue.

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You should check out Bitcoin as a payment option, it was pretty much designed for your use case: http://www.weusecoins.com/en/

BitPay as a payment processor in particular: https://bitpay.com/

That's a terrible idea. Bitcoin is difficult to use for both buyer and seller, has high transaction costs, and is associated in the minds of many customers with illegal transactions.

All that is secondary though to the extreme lack of stability of value, which is pretty important in a medium of exchange. You might as well be telling him to accept tulips.

High transaction costs? Do you have even the slightest idea of what you're talking about? Bitcoin has pretty much the lowest transaction fees of any payment method, and you can even opt out of transaction fees if you're willing to wait slightly longer for processing.

Transaction fees aren't the only cost. You get killed on the bid/ask spread because the USD/BTC market is very illiquid as compared to say USD/INR. The INR/BTC market is so thin you'd be lucky to get fills at all.

I'd be interested to see someone do a USD -> BTC -> INR -> BTC -> USD and see a) if it's even possible in a reasonable amount of time and b) at what cost.

Edit: here's a link to an Indian "local integration partner" of bitpay http://indiabitcoin.com/. They are buying bitcoins for 82% of what they are selling them for.

This assumes you already have bitcoins. Like, your job pays you in Bitcoins or something.

Oh, that isn't the case? Well expect to pay a transaction fee on buying bitcoins (about 5.65% where I live last time I checked).

Once everyone uses bitcoins, it will be a different story. Until then, it's pretty much like anything else.

I nearly fell off my chair at this response. The app is obviously aimed at non-programmers. Good luck getting them to pay you in Bitcoins.

How are users supposed to get bitcoin? It's way too difficult right now compared to cash.

That's the problem exactly. While I encourage folk to implement bitcoin payment, as a developer I don't expect any significant amount of users to adopt it as regular payment option any time soon. Even my more nerdy friends are being very cautious about it - "regular" people like my parents wouldn't touch it even if they knew what the heck it was.

It's a bit of chicken-and-egg problem at the moment, but it has become easier and easier. Blockchain.info + BitStamp works fairly well.

Thanks for the information VMG.

You should beware that converting bitcoins into INR is going to prove difficult in India. I have not yet heard of a single bitcoin exchange for Indian (INR) users.

Correct me if I am wrong.

that's what BitPay.com is for - pays out in local currency

(On a bit of a tangent here:) The primary win of BitPay (and bitcoins in general) seems to the elimination of chargebacks. This is good for merchants, but not-so-great for customers.

It especially isn't suitable for an environment like eBay where you could potentially have less than trusthworthy sellers. In such a situation it is necessary and beneficial to have some sort of middleman (could even be the government), that you could go to, in case whatever you "bought" wasn't what the seller represented it to be (or really any other such issue).

Seriously? I accept money using Paypal though 8 percent fee (4% receiving, and 4% conversion) really sucks. Also, it has mandatory daily auto-transfer to your bank which also sucks for things as refunds ETC.

But you can definitely accept money using premium/business acounts. Premium account requires only your PAN.

If I'm not wrong, adding details like your PAN and bank account etc should allow you to use pay-pal from india.

I already did that but paypal is not letting the transfers.

You can use Indian payment gateways like www.ccavenue.com . They can support Indian and foreign transaction.

Instamojo is one option; Flipkart have launched their own payment gateway as well - Payzippy ( https://www.payzippy.com )

I don't know how things work in India, but in the US you would definitely want to set up some sort of business entity, even if it's just you for a number of reasons. Is it hard to form a business there, and would doing so help you accept payments? Could you sell it to customers who are in India to get things started?

Have you tried Instamojo?

My next step is to use Instamojo, I think it can help me.

Never heard of instamojo so I just checked it out. According to its FAQ [0],

> 5. When do I get paid. .... For offers selling in INR, the amount would be remitted to your Indian bank account if it has crossed minimum payment threshold of ₹500. For offers selling in USD, the amount would be remitted to your Paypal account

Since most of your customers will be paying in USD (I guess),, Instamojo will anyway be paying as per above to your Paypal account. So, IMO, you should sort out Paypal account. (Or talk to Instamojo if they have this option to directly convert USD payments to INR and remit them to your bank account.)

[0] https://www.instamojo.com/faq/

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