Week 10: Payment processing issues

Hey!

To be completely honest, I was a bit dramatic in the post.

We weren't rejected because they didn't want to work with us, we were rejected because based on our location & business model they could not onboard us.

So technically we were rejected in a sense.

Let me break it down:

Stripe:

• All was looking great. They offer all the onboarding sequences and KYC processes. The fees are ok and the support and docs are truly amazing.
  The issue we were facing (and we had several calls with them) was being able to send payments for our freelancers based in the US (I'm not going to go over the technicalities, but basically we couldn't do it because we are based in Europe).

MangoPay:

• Since we want to offer payins and payouts via cards and bank accounts (not Paypal), we'd need an onboarding system and process for sellers where they'd be able to introduce their details (bank details, name, address and all that PLUS the KYC process to get them paid). And with MangoPay we'd have to code that from scratch.(Stripe has all of this done for you already. From the onboarding to the user KYC, which is amazing)

Trustshare:

• Didn't have their API ready yet. Would only have it in January and we didn't felt comfortable with that. Plus the flow they have to pay sellers on the platform is manual, i.e. the buyer receives an email that he/she has to click on "send funds to seller" so the seller gets paid. Not ideal.

Paypal/Hyperwallet:

• The fees would just eat us alive. Plus we don't want to work with Paypal. Our goal is to offer payins and payouts through cards and bank accounts.

Bluesnap:

• Since we're based in Europe, the fees for processing non-EU cards (which the majority of our user base will use sine it's based in the US) were 3.45% + .30 cents, which is too high. And that's just for payins. For payouts Blusnap was charging us an extra .25% if I'm not mistaken. So blusnap is off the table right now.

That said, here's what we need:

• A solution tailored for marketplaces and that works with EU based ones
• Payins using cards and payouts to freelancers bank accounts
• A solution that doesn't eat us alive with crazy fees
• A solution (like Stripe for instance) that has the onboarding and KYC forms ready for us so that we don't have to code them.

Since we came to the conclusion that we'll in fact need to code all the onboarding and KYC forms ourselves, MangoPay does look to be the best solution at the moment.

Sorry if the English is off or the sentence construction is a bit weird. Currently writing this at 2am and heading to bead!

Cheers!

Just wrote above why! :)