Many people may not realise this, but Europe is the largest economy in the world according to the IMF, who know a thing or two about this stuff.<p>Since I saw Stripe last week, I've been wondering why no one in Europe has managed to put something similar together. We have the technical expertise and the world largest economy, so what's stopping us?<p>Sadly, it turns out that Europe is so fragmented and disparate when it comes to banking practices that the benefits of working in the worlds largest economy are completely obliterated by the difficulties of working with all the countries involved, many of which are so fundamentally corrupt (I'm looking at you Italy) that any sane legislation is unlikely to go through.<p>Stripe may well cobble together solutions for individual countries like Germany, France and the UK, where there's enough money flowing around to warrant it, but the return on investment quickly starts to diminish as you tackle the smaller countries, which is not really a great incentive for Stripe to "pull their finger out". I'm not saying they wont (they've already said they will), I'm saying the incentives aren't all that great. And they're even worse for anyone wanting to implement a homegrown solution because we don't have competitive advantage of the US economy to start from.<p>It would be nice if everyone in Europe had the Euro, and everyone in Europe also had the same banking practices, but if you rank that possibility on a scale of 1 to 10, the scale explodes.<p>One alternative I can see happening however is for some savvy EU state to make it ridiculously easy to open up business accounts, with multiple currencies that anyone in Europe (if not the world) can open and run their business through, with the easy transfer of cash from country to country. Other than bureaucracy, I don't see what's stopping them.<p>In fact, the commercial banks could well be eliminated from the equation. The value of the digital economy is important to any countries future growth that the central banks could plausibly take the initiative here.
Patrick from Stripe here. We know how important that is. I personally grew up in Europe (Ireland), and 5 of the 10 people at Stripe grew up outside of the US. It sucks that we're US-only right now.<p>We're actually working on supporting Europe right now. It's pretty complex, and won't happen overnight -- but it's one of our very highest priorities.<p>If you'd like to be notified when Stripe is available wherever you live, you can leave your name at <a href="https://stripe.com/help/global" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/help/global</a>. We'll also announce news at twitter.com/stripe.
It's not like Stripe don't want to come to Europe. In fact, they tried to start here:<p><pre><code> Actually, the first bank we ever talked to about @Stripe was Irish.
They did everything short of laugh.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/patrickc/status/119849024600801280" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/patrickc/status/119849024600801280</a>
Guys, <i>they're working on it.</i> It's not something where if enough people write letters, they will magically be able to set up shop in Europe. Accepting payments in multiple countries is hard, and all the pain <i>you</i> had to go through to get your payments to set up, <i>they're</i> having to go through and more. So you don't need to remind them every forty-five minutes that you want them to come to Europe/Africa/Asia/wherever.
It's amazing that in 2011, launching a simple and elegant payment processor is enough to pretty much disrupt the industry. I'm really hoping Stripe can make it to the UK - I'd be incredibly happy to give them my percentage.
Damn! i was in the middle of writing my "An open letter to Stripe: please come to Asia" post.<p>Looking forward to a post titled "An open letter to Stripe: please come to Africa" in some other blog any minute now. :)<p>Seriously, this is a hair on fire problem for non-US entrepreneurs.<p>Please become BFFs with HSBC since they are present EVERYWHERE.
They're working on it:<p><pre><code> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056105
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053971
</code></pre>
I suspect it's more of a legal/business challenge than a technical one.
When I was working on Gucci.com, Europe was always the biggest problem for payments, each region has different tax law, different payment gateways, shipping laws. Big opportunity to tie Europe together but I don't think its something a startup can do, more intercountry commerce laws need to be made to make it easier.
I dont know why the author thinks the situation is any better in the UK. Its pretty bad here too. A common requirement of getting a merchant account is to have £50,000 sitting in an account doing NOTHING, "just in case". UK online payment processors aren't much better.
In Poland (Europe) there are plenty of Stripe-like services for several years now. They mostly integrate all online payments (online wire transfers, credit cards) but also offline, where you can pay in your local shop, post office or traditional bank transfer. Virtually all banks in the Polish marked are handled. Almost no e-shop will handle payments themselves, especially that integration modules to most of e-commerce software are provided. Therefore I wonder how can it be so different in other parts of Europe?<p>Some samples:
- <a href="http://dotpay.pl/index.php?content=&newlang=en" rel="nofollow">http://dotpay.pl/index.php?content=&newlang=en</a>
- <a href="http://serwis.platnosci.pl/home,462.html" rel="nofollow">http://serwis.platnosci.pl/home,462.html</a>
- <a href="http://www.przelewy24.pl/en" rel="nofollow">http://www.przelewy24.pl/en</a>
- <a href="http://www.payu.pl/" rel="nofollow">http://www.payu.pl/</a>
- ... and many more
It's sad that we live in 2011 and still have to use something like PayPal to do "easy" payment processing. Unless you process a reasonable amount of transactions, forget simple payments. Stripe, where art thou :(
At the moment you can only sign up with a US address. As a stop-gap solution could they enable European addresses but with the caveat that you'd only be able to take payments in USD? This would be fine for me.
If one looks at the latest FB and Google surveys one will find that one of the biggest untapped markets is India. Unfortunately, all these startups that really want to grow big aren't seeing the big picture - and I don't mean just the ones that have started recently. There are many that have been around for a really long time and haven't even tried capturing the upcoming markets.
Two points would have to be covered for me (and others I know) to be interested:<p>- handle VAT like Recurly does it (<a href="http://docs.recurly.com/advanced/value-added-tax/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.recurly.com/advanced/value-added-tax/</a>)<p>- sign Safe Harbor (<a href="http://export.gov/safeharbor/" rel="nofollow">http://export.gov/safeharbor/</a>)
If your non US based, you may be interested in Simplified Ecommerce.<p>We cover the entire payments stack- gateway, vault, PCI compliance, recurring subscription management and Affiliate Marketing. <a href="http://SimplifiedEcommerce.com" rel="nofollow">http://SimplifiedEcommerce.com</a>
Hi Rahul,<p>I definitely agree with getting better technology here… but have you seen gocardless.com?<p>They seem to have a much better (read effective/innovative solution).<p>Let me know what you think in comparison to stripe.<p>Rayhan
Problem in the EU is that there are a lot of different payment systems, in the Netherlands we have iDeal for example which works great, but is only usable here. Dutch people also almost never pay with creditcard
Maybe I'm missing something, but the fees seem way too high for this to be a viable option for anything of scale. Even PayPal's fees are lower, and I get credit card fees of only 2.15% + $0.25 from a company offering a similar service. Yes, Stripe is beautifully designed and simple to use, but since I'm already setup somewhere else with significantly lower fees, I don't see the appeal. Are they specifically targeting small developers?
I want Stripe for my startup. Paypal has caused huge problems for us, as we sell in 24 hour periods we get an influx in sales and our Paypal is constantly locked for a few days meaning we can't pay any merchants and it all becomes a lot of work for something which doesn't have too. There's a whole list of other reasons but Stripe seems much better. We're a UK startup though.
FastSpring and SaaSy work with developers as well and support payments in Euros, Pounds, USD, AUD, CAD, and Yen, have order pages that are translated into 18 languages, and handle global tax management for desktop and SaaS developers.