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I understand payments are a tricky thing, but I'm yet to find a worthy alternative to PayPal. I want to change from PayPal because I think they are expensive and it doesn't work in all countries. Furthermore, I think that the API is sufficient, but could be better. The API documentation, however, is total utter crap.

I am looking for a payment / transaction service that is more developer friendly, preferably with:

  • A clean and well-structured REST API
  • Excellent developer tools and a sandbox
  • Good example API implementations, preferably in Python or Ruby
  • Worldwide credit/debit card coverage
  • Rates cheaper than PayPal (or the possibility to choose a payment plan)

I suppose Google Checkout is somewhat worthy, but it requires both the developer and prospective purchasers to have a Google account. Any other suggestions are very much appreciated!

Andrey Regentov
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Daniel
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    Google Checkout's rate is also identical to Pay Pal's, so you're not gaining much in terms of the "expensive" area. Although, if you get a better api for the same cost, that's a bonus. I mean, is making a free google account a serious deal? :-) – corsiKa Apr 26 '11 at 08:33
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    I would argue this is a valid question. It is asking for advice on choosing a payment processing API. – PaulG Apr 26 '11 at 12:07
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    @PaulG: It's not a valid question, unless you consider "Where should I buy my gas? I drive my car to my programming job." valid as well. It's a question about a service, not how to use that service. Using the API programmatically would be a programming question; which service to use is a programmer's or webmaster's discussion, and is off-topic here. – Ken White Apr 27 '11 at 16:00
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    @Ken White: I can see your point, but I asked the question on SO because I wanted an opinion from a programmers perspective: best API, Developer tools and documentation to get the job done. Maybe I should have left the "business" part out of it (i.e coverage and pricing) – Daniel Apr 27 '11 at 21:30
  • @Daniel, I've taken the liberty of rephrasing parts of your question to emphasize the developer-centric nature of your query. Hopefully I haven't changed the actual question too much. It's kind of a subjective question, and those tend to get closed. – Charles Apr 28 '11 at 01:32
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    It's definitely a valid question. At the very least it could be asked over on programmers.stackexchange.com. – Jordan Apr 28 '11 at 14:40
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    payment express from dps is quite nice to setup / use, it lacks a total sandbox but can give you testing credentials for pre go live, not sure if its available outside this country though.. http://www.paymentexpress.com/index.html – Louis May 05 '11 at 22:44
  • Google Checkout has a lot of limitations on vendor location as well :( – David Nguyen Apr 19 '12 at 15:16
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    This is the highest rated question tagged with `paypal`, and it has been closed as not constructive. I think the SO community may have some skewed priorities... – twiz Aug 08 '13 at 15:54

8 Answers8

40

Stripe fits a lot of your criteria — you can accept credit card payments without a merchant account. You also get to control the payment flow without having to worry about PCI compliance.

A clean and well-structured REST API

The API is based entirely on REST — you can even use curl to charge cards:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges
   -u <YOUR_API_KEY>:
   -d amount=400
   -d currency=usd
   -d "description=Charge for user@example.com"
   -d "card[number]=4242424242424242"
   -d "card[exp_month]=12"
   -d "card[exp_year]=2012"
   -d "card[cvc]=123"

Excellent developer tools and a sandbox

You can test your payment form integration with test API keys before going live. More info: https://stripe.com/docs/testing

Good example API implementations, preferably in in Python or Ruby

Stripe has official libraries in Python, Ruby, PHP and Java, and there are more community-supported ones here: https://stripe.com/docs/libraries

Worldwide credit/debit card coverage

You can charge all international credit and debit cards with Stripe.

Rates cheaper than PayPal (or the possibility to chose a payment plan)

You pay one standard rate of 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Unlike PayPal, there's no extra charge for American Express or international payments. Details here: https://stripe.com/help/pricing

I am an engineer at Stripe. Feel free to drop by our chatroom if you have more questions. You can also email us at support@stripe.com.

A B
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anurag
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    Awesome. It took me more time to find the documentation for PayPal and set up accounts with their sandbox than getting up and running with stripe. Thanks for the tip/advertisement. ;) – Pascal Jun 25 '12 at 05:20
  • I believe Braintree (www.braintreepayments.com) offers a similar service to stripe and does support non US merchants (well at least UK merchants). I can't vouch for the quality of the service though, we've not implemented it yet. – mark Nov 27 '12 at 13:04
  • I do not recommend BrainTree. I was very excited about what they were offering, went through all of their tutorials and tested their sandbox. However they have failed to actually provide me with a live account. Their sales staff do not reply to your emails and their phone always go on voice mail. Then I switched to Stripe. They have a much better sandbox, api and tutorial and I could easily setup my live account in less than a minute or two through their admin panel. – Hamid Tavakoli Jan 24 '13 at 03:45
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    As of October 2013, Stripe supports merchants in 11 countries: https://stripe.com/global – anurag Oct 26 '13 at 23:17
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    The problem with Stripe is that your company must be in the USA. But definitely not an option for Europe based countries. – erdomester Apr 29 '14 at 17:49
11

I find Klarna to be an very good provider.

They have an easy to use API and they also provide different ways of payments. They also provide a service to let your customers pay by invoice and let you get your money immediatly so Klarna takes care of actually getting the money.

mowwwalker
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Marthin
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4

Do you have an objection to using a standard gateway and merchant account? Your bank may resell Authorize.net, for example (I know Wells Fargo does), which has pretty much everything you're looking for. You will end up paying about $40/month in fees for both of these services.

I have used Google Checkout as a payment service as well, and it works fine.

Intuit has a merchant account offering out as well.

Jordan
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4

Moneybookers - http://www.moneybookers.com/

API Manual - http://www.moneybookers.com/merchant/en/moneybookers_gateway_manual.pdf

Sujay Ghosh
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    But they accept more business than PayPal, and won't shut down without warning if you earn too much money (Minecraft), or if you want to donate Christmas presents to poor children (http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0/) – Sire Sep 03 '12 at 17:50
3

First Data

  • Is international
  • Integration is easy and developer friendly
  • REST APIs
  • Support for all mayor tender types (CC, DC, Gift, ACH, Lec, etc)
  • Support for all mayor card companies (even European ones)
  • Many different service plans that adapt to many needs (flat subscription, per transaction volume, per dollar volume, etc)

http://www.firstdata.com

Michel Triana
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1

You should probably consider Amazon's "Flexible Payments Service" too... I'm a fan of most of their web services. Not sure offhand whether payees must have an Amazon account to pay or not... but AWS services tend to be well documented:

http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

codemonkey
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    according to Amazon you need: "A U.S.-based credit card. If you already have a credit card on file with Amazon.com, we'll use this by default, but you can change this card later on the confirmation screen." Does this mean buyers can be worldwide? I fancied this myself but I am UK based. – khany May 06 '11 at 09:18
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    "Amazon FPS allows U.S. as well as international customers to use major credit cards to make payments on Amazon FPS-powered websites. However, bank account and Amazon Payments account balance transfers are enabled only for US based customers. All transactions are in U.S. dollars." (http://aws.amazon.com/fps/faqs/#3) – codemonkey May 06 '11 at 16:49
0

Take a look at SagePay. I haven't developed against PayPal or GoogleCheckout but the SagePay documentation from the knowledgebase is pretty good. SagePay also have a neat little testing platform.

Depending on your usage they can work our cheaper than PayPal and Google checkout.
http://www.zarr.com/Blog/2009/12/Summarizing-Paypal-Google-Checkout-and-Sage-Pay-as-payment-processing-programs/

Hope this helps

NinjaNye
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0

I'm a developer at Payjunction, so I recently looked at ActiveMerchant for Ruby (it can use Payjunction, PayPal, Authorize.net, and some others). If you are looking for a Ruby solution, I like their code, independent of who you use as an actual payment gateway. Don't have a recommendation in Python.

ccoakley
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