[LRUG] UK companies accepting dollar payments

Richard Taylor richard at richt.co.uk
Wed Aug 22 04:45:01 PDT 2012


I'm coming from two directions on this.

As a merchant I currently use Barclaycard Merchant Services to take payments in EUR, USD, GBP and clear into a GBP business account.  The setup was great.  I was introduced to a local Sales Manager through Barclays Business which helped and she came to the house to fill out the application forms! I pay £40/month for the privilege, this is for a regular merchant account, a recurring payments merchant account and the multi-currently merchant account.  It is a bit pricey but I was a startup with no history and wanted to get on the ladder.  I have got really good transaction rates with BMS but they hold payments for 30 days, they say this can be re-negotiated after a couple of years of history.

I then use SagePay as a Payment Gateway.  I have heard bad things in the past about their reliability but I haven't experienced that myself.  I was at their offices recently and they were demonstrating all the technical improvements they have been making and still plan to make the service more reliable.  They deal with any currencies your merchant account can process.  They charge £25 for everything up to 1000 transactions (per quarter!) and then 10p per transaction over that.  I think it is a good deal for getting started.

My personal experiences with PayPal were awful and have put me off for life, but good luck if you can get them to agree with what you want!

The other side of the coin is my startup (shameless plug warning)..

https://subsify.com/ is a recurring billing gateway (like recurly, spreedly etc..) based in London.  It has been a couple of years in the making (not full time) and was a Seedcamp London finalist in 2010.   We're launching in the next month or so and will offer really competitive prices and have a partnership (with SagePay) to provide a merchant account, payment gateway and the recurring billing engine as easy as possible (or you can bring your own Payment Gateway).   

The merchant account has no monthly fee and the transaction fees are about 2.6% typically (higher than you can get with a bank but without the monthly fees so you have to weigh up what fits your needs).  This includes recurring transactions and multi-currency.  Then you have the SagePay payment gateway at the same rates mentioned above.  Subsify then charges a monthly fee and potentially per-transaction fees for each recurring transaction but this is yet to be finalised.  It will be very competitive!  Our API is inspired by the simplicity of stripe and we offer technical solutions to limit your PCI compliance scope while maintaining the best experience for your customers (we are PCI certified).

The whole reason of this startup's being is because I was in the position many of you are in and want to do something that makes a change.  Small steps...

If you're interested in finding out more, contact me offline.

Cheers,

--  
Richard Taylor


On Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 12:18, Andrew Stewart wrote:

>  
> On 22 Aug 2012, at 12:59, Graham Ashton wrote:
> > 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 agree with you there. Additionally I find the admin pages tedious to use: they are so general, a.k.a. "flexible", it's takes ages to figure out how to do anything. It's all a bit enterprisey.
>  
> However SaaSy did enable me to take a USD payment at short notice.
>  
> Now the pressure's off I really must find a replacement...
>  
> Cheers,
> Andy Stewart
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