Server Density has recently finished integrating into Braintree having had awful experiences with Netbanx (aka Optimal Payments) in the UK.
Our existing provider, Netbanx, have terrible customer support often taking days to reply to e-mails and refusing to answer questions over the phone. They have no out of hours support for critical issues and continually change their backend and API without informing customers. This meant we often had failed payments because changes Netbanx made which were undocumented and broke our integration. Having a stable and trusted payment processing partner is essential and Netbanx failed to get this right.
Braintree support has been excellent for the few times we've needed it (their dev docs are great, as are the libraries for each language) and it means we now combine our merchant account and payment API in a single provider, one control panel, one set of rates and one location for support.
Great to see things finally starting to move in the EU payments space!
However with the amount of paperwork required to apply and opaque "contact us" pricing (which includes significant monthly fees if it's anything like the US counterpart) it doesn't sound like they are interested in small clients.
Sticking with FastSpring for now, despite their huge transaction fees.
@entropyneur - we've not published international pricing because we work with multiple banking partners throughout the world who have different pricing structures and accept different merchant types. We're working on standardizing this and making it easier for you. We have a ton of other improvements in the pipeline that will continually improve our offering.
What's great about this is it allows you to host all your payment pages and post them back to your server for processing/validation, without having to worry about PCI compliance apart from the most basic level as you never touch the credit card details.
Although GoCardless is great, it's not the same as a Stripe. Direct debits don't offer immediate transfer of funds[0] (they take a few days) which limits its suitability for a lot of e-commerce applications. As someone else mentioned, the lack of refunds is also an issue.
That said, for service invoicing, subscriptions, etc it's fantastic.
To the best of my knowledge, you can't handle refunds through the GoCardless API, you have to arrange a BACS transfer by other means. My experience working with e-commerce is that refunds happen so frequently that this presents a massive hurdle to using GoCardless.
Does somebody has experience with them or knows how they compare to SaaSy/Fastspring? From a first glance they both provide a complete solution for payments, including a gateway for tacking credit card, merchant account, recurring billing, invoicing and stuff like that.
SaaSy from FastSpring is an all-inclusive, full service offering that requires far less development work to obtain the key functionality needed for a serious SaaS business. SaaSy has no monthly charges, handles global tax management (VAT included), the order pages are translated into 20+ languages, has paypal integration, order & billing support for clients' customers, reseller management, avoids having to deal with anything related to PCI compliance, has a built-in shopping cart, integration with Google Analytics, Adwords, and countless other 3rd party services, has a future bill testing GUI, supports on-demand subscriptions, pre-bill (annual) notifications, and the list goes on.
For perspective, it is interesting to observe whats happening in the low-end space for payments as well. There is a firm called eko - referred to as "India's Square" - payments done using simple SMS.
I thought Braintree was also looking at launching in Australia during Q3? Was hoping to find that in this release as well, as the only real alternative (pin.net.au) is still in private beta.
We'd love to. We're definitely not done introducing our product to other countries. If you go to https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international and click on the link to the right that says, "Not in Canada or the EU?" that will put you on a notification list for when we are in your specific country.
Processing costs are interchange (the market rate set by Visa and Mastercard) + .70 basis points. If the interchange rate is 1.20%, you will pay 1.90%, for example. Monthly pricing is 100 EUR/GBP per month. That includes your first 1000 transaction fees for free. Starting from your 1001st transaction, you will pay 0.10 EUR/GBP per transaction.
We have multiple banking partners throughout the world who have different pricing structures and are willing to accept different merchant types. We're working to standardize this to make it easier on you. As always, our pricing is transparent and we don't have any hidden fees.
Our existing provider, Netbanx, have terrible customer support often taking days to reply to e-mails and refusing to answer questions over the phone. They have no out of hours support for critical issues and continually change their backend and API without informing customers. This meant we often had failed payments because changes Netbanx made which were undocumented and broke our integration. Having a stable and trusted payment processing partner is essential and Netbanx failed to get this right.
Braintree support has been excellent for the few times we've needed it (their dev docs are great, as are the libraries for each language) and it means we now combine our merchant account and payment API in a single provider, one control panel, one set of rates and one location for support.