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Comment by SupremumLimit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Stripe is planning to launch in New Zealand any time soon - it's very close to Australia :) I'm really keen to stop relying on Paypal for accepting payments.

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We are working on New Zealand, but don't have an immediate ETA for an New Zealand beta. Sign up at https://stripe.com/global to be notified when we launch

That is amazing news. Payments are absolutely horrible in NZ, I have been desperate for Stripe to be here for the longest time :)

What are you using now?

Whatever you use it will invariably suck in some way. PX is fine, but getting a merchant account sure isn't. All the stripe clones in NZ are balls. Please, Stripe, whatever you're doing to get to NZ, double it!

Using Paypal at the moment, as te_chris said PX pay is decent but requires a merchant account which is expensive and slow to setup. As far as I am aware their aren't any other decent solutions. Kiwipay could be good but at the moment it isn't really suitable for anything more than casual payments.

Aside from merchant account setup, last time I looked (4 years ago), Payment Express worked out to be really expensive when charging in USD. I think it was in part due to merchant account/currency conversion charges by the bank. It was significantly more expensive than Paypal. I don't know if the situation has changed since then.

I know that the only bank that allows international currency transactions is BNZ so they are likely fairly expensive seen as they have an monopoly on it.

Technically (for those who don't know) they allow multiple currency transactions from one/single account. So you may have 1,000 NZD but it's made out of USD, PHP, AUD etc

Where would you be located? I might have a possible solution for you.

How about Hong Kong? Is it on the roadmap?

ditto, Hong Kong please!

Likewise. A gateway to China.

Please, please come to NZ. We are stuck in an awful monopoly of Payment Express and overpriced merchant accounts.

They already fixed that in Belguim.. FOr reference, here is the cost of Ogone in Belgium:

Cheapest subscription: Setup: 300 € and monthly: 65 €

Fraud detection module: Setup: 300 € and monthly 10 €

Per transaction:

* Credit card: 0.37 € + 2% + 0.3 %

* Debit card: 0.37 € + % Tunz

Yeah, i didn't agree to that. Great (developer) support from Stripe, i'm glad they did a beta in Belgium!

+ They have IRC ;-)

YES, please! Stripe in NZ would be amazing. Email is in my profile if you need someone to pre-beta test.

Has anyone tried http://swipehq.com? Their website looks good and the cost looks ok too.

I think it might be OK for one-off payments, but I couldn't find anything other than manual setup of recurring payments on their web site. Price wise it's comparable to Paypal though. The trouble for me is that it doesn't integrate with my shopping cart (getdpd.com).

I looked at it in some detail but they were a pain to assess. Wouldn't give me any details of the API or feature set unless I created an account... for a non-refundable $200 fee. I pointed out how ridiculous this was, and they said that if I went through their signup process and committed to paying the $200, they would let me look at the documentation without actually paying the fee. It was all so vague and ad-hoc I found it pretty hard to trust whatever might be behind the curtain.

(edit: Looks like fee is now $99, and there's a little more detail on their developers page.)

PX pricing is actually pretty good if you've got high transaction volume. But it's terrible for small biz. Most people I know default to Paypal.

Please Stripe, please come to NZ fast. You've been talking about it for more than a year. I know we must look like smaller-poorer Australia, but I promise there are people here who'd use you!

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