http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/ins...
So, proceed with caution if you decide to use them. (That being said, I wonder if Stripe will just buy them in order to get European payments working?)
Additionally, I don't know if I can criticise their model. Yes, it's not very innovative, but on the other hand you can think of it as a outsourced European development team for US-based startups. They know the market, the language(s), the problems. They do the development work and then if the original startup wants to buy the product, they can. Who knows, perhaps it might even end up being not much more expensive than setting up the infrastructure and acquiring the knowledge required to operate in the EU. It might also serve as a test case: "is service X really going to work in the EU?". They take the risk that something might not work.
As an EU-based developer (who never used any of their products. yet?), I also think it's valuable for us (EU-based developers). Instead of waiting for startup X to get their act together, they offer us an alternative, which then later might be merged with the original product.
As a side note, there is a bit of a unintentional Schadenfreude to be found in this article as well. Since it's 6 - 7 months old, their investments in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon doesn't look so hot anymore as it did back then. Maybe they should avoid the investment side of things.
Edit: grammar
This is important to keep in mind if your company uses them to accept payments.
Also, I think it's a bit unfair to reduce the brothers to a "copy-cat" title. This happens everywhere, its just that they are the most successful at it. There are a lot of really cool tech companies in the valley that are relevant to non-english-speaking countries and developing ones but these countries don't fully benefit because the originators of the ideas pay no special attention to this countries. Mere providing different language translations does not breakdown the different albeit subtle differences between different cultures.
I think the samwers should be commended for what they do especially for their German market.
Stripe would never, ever, ever acquire a clone like this. First, because the notion is already rare. But more overwhelming is Stripe's intense focus on creating its own culture and building its own stuff.
Nobody pays online with a credit card.
For those in the UK jumping for joy at a Stripe like payment gateway there is a bit of a gotcha it only supports Euros.
Also there is no details about who is actually processing the payments and several interesting and dubious (but again could simply be translation problems) statements about PCI compliance on the site which could make due diligence interesting.
Something to watch, but for UK merchants I suspect it may be a lot of work to get going so not quite the frictionless option people are holding out for. Be interesting to hear from a German companies perspective to see if similar issues exist on the paymill.de site?
It worries me when the first two sentences contradict each other: "Paymill enables you to offer credit card payments on your website within a short time. There is no waiting time" Which one is it?
I hope it's the real deal because the world needs it (we deal with a lot of non US developers around payments all the time so know the pain). But Stripe hasn't nailed it and Braintree couldn't nail the "immediate sign up" outside of the US so I too will wait to hear if it's all that much different.
Lastly looks like just Visa/MC. No AMEX or Discover which isn't the terrible but worth noting vs other options. (AMEX is more expensive so not having it I'm sure helped them get to 2.9%)
The only issue I have is that the activation process seems like any other merchant account application. It will be interesting to hear from people who are rejected in the activation process to see how 'frictionless' these guys really are!
I'm stoked to have you guys launched and I'm sure many other developers are also.
This is nothing but good news, anything that makes accepting payments easier is a god send. If Stripe were gone tomorrow, how more difficult would our lives be?
Then again those Samwer brothers aren't short for cash.
So this is good news for my European friends.
Yes the Samwise brothers outright steal ideas, but if you object then go and out-execute them in Europe. If you can't do that and the competition was fair, then the market has found a better solution. The only other path is in mandating a monopoly
Why? Because this looks like where Stripe were and I know that when Stripe finally makes it to the UK they are the ones pushing the envelope and I want to be where they are.
I also hope Stripe will be more competitive on fees.
Obviously, should the need be pressing then this looks like a good stop-gap.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: .paymill.de , paymill.de
Anyone else getting this error?
Alternatively you can hit our website with paymill.com without entering https in your URL.
There are a lot of questions still to be answered before I'd go anywhere near this service for a UK company...
But a small correction: we support the local currency of your company. If you are based in the UK, you'll be able to accept GBP. If you need support for other European currencies, you can contact us and we can certainly look into it.
About the PCI compliance: you don't have to be PCI compliant, for one reason: the payment data never reaches your server. Our javascript bridge solution takes care of sending the data directly to our payment servers (which are PCI compliant), so you don't have to be.
I'm not sure what you mean by not being frictionless for UK companies. Is this about the points above? If not, please do let us know what your concerns are :-)
You may wish to change some of your terminology to match the rest of the industry a "reclaim" for instance I assume you mean a chargeback. You also mix the terms reclaim and refund in several places. Assuming you meant chargeback then a chargeback and a refund are two very separate things.
Also as pointed out the FAQ states only Euros are supported, I'm glad to hear that GBP is also supported I shall have another play in a bit. But how then is currency conversion reconciled?
Ultimately the site is littered with mistakes (mostly I'm sure due translation) and these reflect an image of service that's not quite finished.
So which is it?
a guy from our business team will contact you in the next days. Looks like a cool service you're offering! :)
We're thinking about AMEX and it could be another possible step in our v3. Actually we want to fix some minor bugs, our blog will updated within the next 1-2 weeks so you can stay tuned on English as well.
We actually didn't have the time to update our blog regularly regarding our European rollout. ;)
For what it's worth, AMEX is uncommon in my EU country (and I say that as someone who uses AMEX) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's just as rare throughout the EU. I have literally never seen a Discover card.
From the look of the API is also seems like Paymill wouldn't be of any use if you ship physical products. Some European countries don't allow you to charge the customers card until the goods are actually shipped. This mean that you do need to be able to reserve the money and later do a "capture".
I love the simplicity of solutions like Stripe and Paymill, but I really don't see them be all that useful. That might of cause be because I'm in the business of shipping physical products in small geographic location.
EDIT: Just noticed Dankort being supported by Spreedlycore, awesome.
It says you can trigger the capture to fire a bit later, though you'd probably want that to happen when you ship an order -- which you can do with the API by creating a new Transaction from your preauthorization: https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/documentation-3/reference/api-...
It seems like is saying the amount of time required by the developer is small and that you don't have to wait for approval/activation. (i.e. if it was a process it would be both fast and cpu-bound.)
I don't think that's necessarily true. The service lets you get payment processing up on your site in a short time. There is no waiting period to get an account set up to receive payments. It makes sense, its just not super specific.
Correction: Braintree hasn't nailed it even inside US, despite reports otherwise. Even though you can sign up and get started with a developer account immediately, there is a human underwriter who looks at your account and activates production. This process might take lesser time now, but its not automated (like Stripe) and some people might get rejected on the way.
This step is the key value proposition for me. If Braintree or Paymill doesn't work like that, then they are not comparable to Stripe.
just write us a mail to support@paymill.com. It's possible having USD as currency with our service as well, we just have to change our FAQs tomorrow. ;)
This is no worse then any of the other payment processors in the UK but hardly the frictionless option that is in the US.
this is sadly a historic relief from our German site from our first version of our site, we're gonna fix it tomorrow. Thanks for the hint!
However, we offer domestic currencies, but also USD/EUR if you want to. Just contact us at support@paymill.com, and we can get things done.
But I double-checked their FAQ and couldn't verify that, actually... I can't find details on how they manage the actual charge to foreign cards.
It's an important issue, because if they just charge in USD, holders of foreign cards will presumably see a "foreign transaction fee" in their statement, which discourages future purchases.
If they are able to charge the card in its own currency and avoid the fees, that means they're doing the conversion themselves, and setting the rate.
I still suspect it's the former solution, but I'll have to ask about that....
1: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_saq_a_v2....
Seriously, I come to think IT products are inferior to physical products in the terms of being able to distribute and make them available regardless of politics.
Ooh! And the US (Cuban cigars).
Even in USSR people managed to smuggle enough British LPs and Japanese tape recorders to kickstart a Rock movement. It's not that hard.
Compare this to major IT services (Amazon, iTunes, movie streaming) not available in quite a few otherwise rich and democratic, albeit small, countries; or even only available in a selected few of countries.
My impression has been that companies have prevented each other from distributing to some of those rich and democratic small countries. Through region specific licensing of their media they've limited distribution. I don't think those are political measures, although certainly in other cases companies have used political means to achieve their goals.
