[LRUG] UK companies accepting dollar payments

Graham Ashton graham at effectif.com
Wed Aug 22 03:59:09 PDT 2012


On 22 Aug 2012, at 08:14, Andrew Stewart wrote:

> I use SaaSy to take card payments in USD from my US customers.  SaaSy pays out to me in GBP.

I looked at SaaSy, mainly because of the ease of setup. I wasn't very impressed by their web site, their documentation, or their billing pages. It all felt a bit 1999.

I'm coming down in favour of PayPal Payments Pro (£20 a month) for the merchant account, fronted by Recurly for recurring billing and integration into my site (see http://js.recurly.com).

I'd use a less contentious merchant account if it wasn't for the fact that it'd take me half a day to get the paperwork together. Quite possibly longer.

I applied for Paypal Payments Pro yesterday (the online form is fairly short), and have had a call from somebody in Ireland this morning. What I wasn't expecting was for her to send me her direct phone number.

I'll let you know if it goes west, but from what I've heard Payments Pro works well for SaaS businesses due to the 30-day billing cycle and the approach that we tend to take to giving refunds (i.e. we give them). That reduces PayPal's liability.

I've seen some fairly well known "PayPal screwed my conference" blog posts over the last few years, which I now suspect is partly due to the nature of a conference (PayPal will be concerned about all attendees asking for their money back, and PayPal having to stump up that cash). I don't think it's unreasonable for conference organisers to expect PayPal to identify this particular problem at the outset, rather than freezing the account halfway down the line (!!) but I can't ignore the fact that a SaaS business isn't exposed to that risk.

I had a long conversation with HSBC about their approach to liability. To setup a merchant account they wanted me to put down a fairly hefty security to protect their liability should all of my customers ask for a refund at the end of the first month. The guy I spoke to was very helpful and openly disappointed about how risk averse HSBC are on this topic.

I'm no expert (obviously); this is just what I've pieced together over the last week or so. My research hasn't been that rigorous, and I'd recommend that everybody do their own.

Incidentally, Stevie's comment about Braintree and a private beta was on the money.

-- 
Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton



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