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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

Just to add to this, I think any serious company you'd work with would be shocked by someone wanting to be paid in anything other than a wire transfer (and by "shocked", read "wouldn't be able to do it and wouldn't take you seriously because of it). In my experience, this is how almost all payments are made in the real world.

If you're a professional, use a wire transfer like everybody else.

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Absolutely correct with regards to "clients will neither comply with nor be impressed by requests to pay in any manner they're not used to paying by", but I think that wire transfers are actually fairly exotic by US standards. They typically expect to pay with checks or ACH payments. (More often checks, in my experience. Source: I've cashed hundreds of thousands of dollars of them, and every time it happens I worry that this is finally the time that I'll be shot for robbing the bank.)

Imagine what it's like to walk into your Podunk suburban bank every two weeks with a $50K+ check in your hands from a company with a .com in their name. Yeah, that was fun.

But Patrick's absolutely right re: checks. If cash flow is tight, my favorite trick is to FedEx a prepaid overnight envelope to your client. Ask them to place the check inside. This elimates the "check is in the mail" song and dance, and it's only marginally more expensive than a wire fee.

I'm based in the UK, with some clients in the US and EU. I always offer direct bank transfer (to UK bank account), credit card and PayPal as payment options.

In the UK/EU everything is a direct bank transfer.

From the US — despite offering the wire transfer details — the majority of payments I've received are CC, PayPal and (ugh) cheque. Apparently it causes them less hassle that arranging a wire transfer with their accounts department. As ever YMMV.

I have to say that's fairly surprising to me - all of our clients, both from the US and from other places, pay with bank transfers. I've never seen anyone suggest using PayPal or a credit card, and I would find it surprising to make payments of 10s of thousands of dollars that way.

But as you said, that's just been my experience, I guess there are other ways of doing things.

All three options (bank transfer, CC & Paypal) are presented on the invoice — so this hasn't been through client request but through client preference. I'd actually prefer bank transfer since it usually works out slightly cheaper. But not enough to care about ;-)

Yep, you and patio11 are very right in assuming that if transfer fees are a problem, you're not charging nearly enough.

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