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Living Room / What are your experiences with payment providers?
« on: March 25, 2012, 05:31 AM »
I have been setting up accounts with several different payment providers so that I can charge for my .Net licensing solution (part of the NANY challenge for 2012)
So far I have signed up with PayPal (who hasn't), FastSpring, Kagi and Share-It. I have only had time to set things up with PayPal and FastSpring properly so far. These are some of my observations for those two and some initial reflections on Kagi.
PayPal
FastSpring
Kagi - I have not set up a full product with Kagi yet but these are some initial observations.
What are your experiences with these and other payment providers? Particularly I would be interested to hear what their customer support is like...
So far I have signed up with PayPal (who hasn't), FastSpring, Kagi and Share-It. I have only had time to set things up with PayPal and FastSpring properly so far. These are some of my observations for those two and some initial reflections on Kagi.
PayPal
- Very clunky tax handling which is not optimal for EU companies. I need to allow my clients to enter a VAT number and have the payment provider figure out what to do. PayPal doesn't seem to support that at all?
- No tax support at all for subscriptions with PayPal - which basically makes this a no go for EU companies.
- Possible affiliate support if you do split payments and set everything up yourself, which seems very difficult and error prone...
- Supports instant payment notifications.
- Nice clean professional payment user interface for end users, certain modification of the UI (logo etc) are possible.
- Does not support coupon codes?
- Does not have application integration (for selling/donating) directly within application, only via links to Paypal.
FastSpring
- Automatic handling of taxes (inlcuding EU vat)
- Supports subscriptions with taxes.
- Does not support affiliates as far as I can see other than if you contact them direct to have split payment set up.
- Supports instant payment notifications.
- Not such an attractive user interface for end users when they purchase - input elements are too small for data (VAT nr for instance). Not so modern colors... Seems to support advanced modifications of the UI using custom css though.
- Supports coupon codes and special offers in several different ways.
- Allows purchase UI to be integrated directly into windows applications
Kagi - I have not set up a full product with Kagi yet but these are some initial observations.
- Automatic handling of taxes (inlcuding EU vat)
- Support for affiliates and partner splits also (as far as I can tell)
- Supports instant payment notifications.
- Haven't looked at the payment UI yet...
- Allows purchase UI to be integrated directly into windows applications
What are your experiences with these and other payment providers? Particularly I would be interested to hear what their customer support is like...