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Comment by Smrchy | Hacker News Reader

I just wish Amazon would not talk about 200m accounts worldwide and then offering payments only for US customers.

I'm Europe-based, I feel your pain. Every time I read about some new potentially awesome payment service, but only for the US-audience it consistently manages to make me grumpy all day thinking about all the lost business possibilities.

Presumably they'd lose a lot more business possibilities going to Europe (or more likely, a single European country) before the US.

I think he meant his or her lost business opportunities.

Yes, that's what I meant.

Random numbers are not that meaningful but the US has 300 million habitants, the EU 500 million. Comparing GDP the EU states grouped together are a bit less than a tenth bigger than the US.

I think there can plenty of reasons to start a business in the US first (looser regulations and local talent are what comesto my first to mind) but would you lose business starting in a bigger market ?

The EU has more people, but they're spread through 28 countries, each of which probably has different laws regulating financial transactions and payment processing, making it a lot more work.

Different laws, and different languages!

From the little I know US has 51 states with each their little twist on different subjects like taxation or company laws. EU has a set of global rules, no trade barriers between the countries, and financial transactions and payment also should belong to a unified space thanks to the SEPA.

Doing payment cross europe may have it's difficulties I don't know, but on the paper that's not so different from the US, and as a customer I don't feel friction dealing with other countries merchants.

For the language question, if you're building a payment processor, localization of your interface won't be your biggest problem. BtoB documentation and support is OK in english, customer facing interface should be localized, but even supporting the main 3 or 4 languages should let you access most of the market.

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