Online payment options for SaaS (includes those supported in UK)

http://blog.ontestpad.com/2011/12/online-payments-for-saas-billing.html

by radimm • 15 years ago

64 30 15 years ago

blog.ontestpad.com

radimm3• 15 years ago

As the most discussions here on HN focus on moving away from PayPal, but don't offer options for UK/EU based companies - this blog post provides good overview what's available.

So it's basically:

* FastSpring

* Amazon FPS

* PayPal Payments (Pro)

+ simplifiedecommerce

Did I miss something?

gizmo2• 15 years ago

Yes, the part where UK != EU.

Fastspring is available in all EU countries, I think, but Amazon FPS is available only in the UK. Not in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, I think. Paypal Business Payments? UK Yes, rest of europe? Nope. Basically, for the table to be useful to people from the EU it would have to have a column for every EU country.

Also, the PCI compliance part is not very accurate. You can get PCI compliance by simply paying some certification company and filling out a self-assessment document. Techies always think that because PCI is about safety of credit card data in order to qualify you have to prove that you act responsibly with credit card data. This is not the case. It's strictly a legal matter. You're properly PCI compliant if you meet the arbitrary legal requirements.

radimm3• 15 years ago

Thanks, didn't realize there are such a differences.

risratorn2• 15 years ago

Are there actually any modern payment gateways available worldwide that don't suck? I've tried Paypal and Ogone and they both are a serious hassle. How i would loooove stripe or wepay to become available worldwide!

smiler2• 15 years ago

Yes, Google checkout is available to UK merchants. Fees are only 3.4% + £0.20 which seems far better than what FastSpring are offering

stefanbutlin4• 15 years ago

Google Checkout doesn't really do anything to help with subscription services though.

They have something coming for subscriptions which is in beta and described here: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko....

Chargify have an article comparing their service (recurring billing management) with Google Checkout here: http://help.chargify.com/entries/20110971-how-does-chargify-...

petercooper• 15 years ago

Amazon FPS is usable from the UK but it demands you have a "US-based credit card" to sign up for it so it somewhat defeats the point of being available in the UK since getting a credit card with a US billing address is rather complicated.

Google's system is another waste of time because it demands you bill in your local currency and can't support anything else. Not much use if you're in the UK and have mostly US customers.

highace• 15 years ago

This is great, I was shortly going to be looking for a 'Stripe in the UK' and this has saved me a lot of trouble, thanks.

Secondly, I think your product looks good, especially considering it appears you're wore all the hats during it's production.

radimm3• 15 years ago

All thanks goes to ontestpad.com owners, I'm just re-posting the article which popped in google search when I was thinking about writing such an overview.

stefanbutlin4• 15 years ago

Thanks! By all means get in touch if you want to talk more about this stuff - email is stef at ontestpad.com.

suking2• 15 years ago

Just get a merchant account and program it yourself - it's super easy to do. I don't even understand a need for 3rd party recurring billing companies - programming something to charge someone $X amount every X days is pretty dang easy...

patio11• 15 years ago

You're right, but that isn't the problem.

+ What if we change gateways?

+ What happens when someone gets a card declined for an unspecified? Retries? What if the error was fatal? Sends an email? Does it cut their service immediately or after a grace period? If they pay on day 2 of the grace period, do they get 30 days of service or 28?

+ What happens if someone wants to upgrade from the $29 / mo account to the $79 / mo account on the 4th of March if their anniversary date was the 25th of February in a leap year?

+ A bug screwed up Bob's data and we're offering him $125 of credit to say we're-so-sorry. You built that feature, right?

+ Our accountant wants to know "How much have we billed this year?", "How much have we collected this year?", and "How much money have we collected that have we not earned yet?" You built that, right?

+ Foo Corp filed a chargeback against payment #123456. This means we got a callback ping and did something consequential as a result of it, right?

+ Why are you answering these questions when you could be writing code that people actually pay for?

suking2• 15 years ago

1) auth.net is always safe

2) you set it to whatever you want

3) easy - you decide - probably pro-rate

4) credits are easy

5) select sum(amount) from charges where date='this year'... the other thing is just accounting by dates, up to individual company... easy reporting by date

6) chargeback you get a fax or letter - respond back and keep templates for each case - EASY

7) b/c then you're not paying someone else for a trivial service.

tomblomfield• 15 years ago

If you're looking to take regular payments from UK customers, check out gocardless.com. We're based on Direct Debit (bank-to-bank payments), so charges are only 1% per transaction

We're still in closed trial, but happy to give out invitations to HN users

Email me - tom@gocardless.com

smiler2• 15 years ago

This is flawed from the start.

1. Many people will only use a CC online for the additional protection it allows.

2. Many people put all their spending on CC for the various point / bonus schemes they have

3. This limits you to UK people only. Surely the purpose for most people creating a web app is to reach a global audience

timthorn• 15 years ago

True, there are limits - but that doesn't mean it's flawed. 1. DD also provides protection. Admittedly not at the same level, but the banks do guarantee the scheme against misuse. 2. Very true - but if only DD is offered as an ongoing payment mechanism then many people will use it. 3. The UK is a perfectly valid market to target - and hosted DD provision is an excellent innovation to offer.

MattRob• 15 years ago

As a heads up I'm from GC but as quick responses:

1) It's little known but the protection under DD are arguably stronger than those under cc (http://www.bacs.co.uk/bacs/businesses/directdebit/collecting...); but your point still holds for as long as this remains little known ;)

2) Fair point, although this varies a lot by country (consider CC usage in Germany) and is not the case for B2B transactions

3) No it doesn't. There's a pan-European ACH network (SEPA DD), also if you look at PayPal they offer Bank transfer in US & Europe using ACH in a similar way

hm2k• 15 years ago

Brilliant, well done. I had no idea most of these existed and have been using Google Checkout since Paypal locked us out.

noodle• 15 years ago

5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order with a minimum of $0.75 is pretty steep pricing.

datadon• 15 years ago

I'm curious as to why there was no inclusion of 2checkout?

I have used it recently for recurring payments (I'm in the UK, clients around the world) and it seems to be going okay.

It's not the smoothest solution (redirect to their checkout process), but they send a lot over postbacks to ease integration.

(Hopefully no one is going to come in with a showstopper!)

stefanbutlin4• 15 years ago

Didn't find them when I went looking, that's all. FWIW, FastSpring's checkout is also a redirect, but they give you some pretty flexible control over the markup and CSS so its quite simple to keep the branding consistent.

chrisharis2• 15 years ago

Don't think any of the SaaS billing providers today really suite SMBs in cost wise. Merchant account costs, transaction costs, billing provider costs could easily add up to around 10-20% of each transaction.

stefanbutlin4• 15 years ago

It doesn't get that expensive.

FastSpring's price is ALL IN. It includes the merchant account, payment gateway and subscription features, and no setup fees nor monthly charges; just the per-transaction costs as noodle commented.

Plus, sign-up and testing is totally free and still gets awesome customer support; you only start paying them anything when you start selling your service. This struck me as ideal for an SMB in its first year.

chrisharis2• 15 years ago

Great to hear it worked for you. But in my case if I'm selling 3k per month with $5-10 per user, one option would charge me around $270 and other around $500. Not really good for micro payment based products.

And this isn't about SaaSy. It's same with all services out there.

dirtyaura• 15 years ago

If you need target Germany or Nordic countries, checkout Klarna https://klarna.com/en/business

They have ok APIs, although they are e-commerce focused.

They also just got a whopping 155 million dollar investment from DST and earlier investment round is from Sequoia. I'd expect them to open up in new countries soon. http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/12/09/klarna-receives-155-...

moe• 15 years ago

155 million dollar investment

Hopefully they'll be able to afford a webdesigner.

Their site would neither tell me if they're available in my country nor could I find any pricing information whatsoever. Instead I was left with motion sickness due to all the flickering and bouncing...

Online payment options for SaaS (includes those supported in UK)

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