One thing the article mentions that is not correct is that "there's no need to be PCI Compliant as Stripe handles this whole process for you." While it is true that Stripe bundles the merchant account, you do still need to be PCI compliant. They even say as much in their Terms of Service (section 8): "You agree that at all times you shall be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) and the Payment Application Data Security Standards (PA-DSS), as applicable."<p>It is very dangerous to think that just because you use a service you are not responsible for PCI compliance. Any business that accepts credit card payments needs to be sure and research what their exact relationship is with PCI.<p>(Disclosure, I work for Braintree)
I'm very interested in more stories here. Do people on HN share the OP's experiences with Paymill? Anyone working at Paymill reading this?<p>I know Paymill is one of Rocket Internet's many "ripoffs" of successful US companies, but as a European I really don't care about that. They executed on Zalando real well, I've no reason at all to assume that they'd not execute well on Paymill. Or, well, I <i>had</i> no reason to assume so until this article.
Just adding a datapoint. I went through the verification and it was annoying to print, fill out, scan and send but not that horrible. The staff was helpful and followed through with the whole process. They even rang me up at one point because there weren’t any transactions coming through to see if I needed any help with the software end of things (that wasn’t the case, but nice to know they care).
As I'm a member from the dev team and have read this article and following discussions, we will write tomorrow a blog post regarding concerning issues the OP mentioned. There are really some fair points of critics, which we should consider thoroughly and change for the future. A more detailled answer tomorrow.<p>Best,
Dominic
I looked in to Pay Mill a few months ago when I was setting up my website. Being in the UK we couldn't use stripe and so it initialy looked like a good option but then when you dig into it you find its no different than a merchant account. Ultimately I went with paypal as I could set it up quickly and then move to another option later on when the idea is validated.<p>We are now raman profitable and so when stripe launches over here i will probably move to it but if it doesn't we are now in a position with trading history to get a merchant account.
I've been looking at using Paymill for an upcoming side project but now I think I might just use Braintree instead after reading this article. The purported lack of paperwork was a big selling point for me but if if this article is true (as well as other comments on here) then it's a big turn off.
It's them same with Samwers clone of Square, Payleven. They send you a cardreader immediatly but before you can use it you have to sign 5 different paperworks and wait for approvals. Just sad and the reason iZettle is still the only Square-a-like in Europe.
Read the general terms and you know why your client was rejected. You wrote it's a 'dating website' and according to the terms 'Partner negotiations of any kind' are not allowed.
The site in the OP is not accessible right now, but by reading the other comments I assume it's about the paperwork you have to go through after you signed up for PayMill.<p>My experience is that it takes an hour to sign up, then they'll send you some papers to sign and you are good to go and ready to accept payments.<p>Then a month later you'll get an email telling you to go through a certification done by a third-party. You'll have to download a .rtf with about 20 pages, formatted in a horrible way and go through the answers with no real guidance. You don't have to fill in a lot of information if you are using PayMill because you are not actually storing any sensitive information on your servers. That's not really PayMill's fault because it's required by law but it's _very_ annoying and I had to resubmit it twice because I missed some fields (Which isn't really that surprising if you look at the way the document is designed).<p>A few weeks later I had to go through another verification required by EU's money laundering laws. But it was basically just signing a document at the post office so they can verify it with your passport.<p>Edit: I have to add that PayMill's Support Staff is brilliant and they really care about their customers. They probably hate the required paperwork as much as we do.
Site's taking ages to load, so here's the google cache <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tBHXw_PrE_cJ:notes.prashant.es/post/paymill.-is-it-really-a-clone-of-stripe+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tBHXw_P...</a>
I don't really see the point of a European Stripe clone, since in Europe we're dealing with a completely different set of problems when it comes to online payment.<p>In many countries it's relatively painless if not trivial to set up a merchant account and start accepting payments through one of the many payment service providers, so for the internal market a Stripe-like service doesn't offer much of an advantage over tried and trusted local services.<p>If you want to accept payments across Europe, especially the many local direct payment solutions which are often much more popular than credit cards (and Paymill doesn't support any of them), you'll run into a whole different class of problems which any service will have a hard time solving.<p>But if you want to disrupt the European online payment market, then that's the problem to solve.
Ugh. With tiny 12px text, the blog has zooming <i>disabled</i> for Webkit browsers, even desktop ones, by specifying:<p><pre><code> -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
</code></pre>
That's a horrible bug and makes it practically unreadable.<p>EDIT: never mind, apparently it was fixed in the meantime.
As for Japanese Stripe clone, webpay is literary a clone. They offer using stripe gem for accessing their API.<p><a href="https://github.com/keikubo/webpay-ruby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/keikubo/webpay-ruby</a>
I think Paymill would be a good alternative for us Europeans if not for the pricing. 2.95% + 0.28€ for transaction is really bad if you work with low margins and far far worse what we get working directly with our bank (and don't forget you only see your money once a week).
Thanks to everyone for feedback, we really appreciate your input! We have compiled a blog post to answer your questions:<p><a href="https://blog.paymill.com/2013/02/25/customer-feedback-on-our-service/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.paymill.com/2013/02/25/customer-feedback-on-our...</a><p>Best,
Dominic
This is similar to the issue I had with Paymill. Their bank seems to turn down applications because of a lack of trading history or because you can't meet some strange German legal requirement.
OP should really consider writing larger and <i>allow zoom!</i>.<p>Luckily there's still Readability...<p>Edit: well I'm not sure what just happened, but the whole layout has changed... everything is good now.