What Payment Provider and Invoicing Services do you use?

To which countries do you want to offer your service and how big do you think your sales volumes are going to be in those countries?

We wanted to use Stripe for everything but unfortunately they do not handle sales tax. They recently introduced VAT handling for the EU which is great but it still leaves you with you having to register for VAT moss and actually remitting the VAT, storing the data etc.

Furthermore if you only use Stripe you can't sell in many other countries where you need to charge sales tax if you have economic nexus. For some countries you have to register and remit tax already with 1 single sale, other countries have thresholds.

If you look at the US alone, half of the states have already introduces sales taxes if you make 200 independent sales into such state or have 100000$ in a year.
If you really want to grow your business and not be scared if you get featured somewhere or have a major boom (because then you would enter a tax nightmare), it's better to look elsewhere.

Fastspring or Paddle are options. Much like if you sell an app on the App store, Fastpring or Paddle act as a merchant of record of your service and they take care of collecting and remitting tax; not you. With such a service you can sell pretty much everywhere and you receive a simple invoice once a month.
No headache about taxes, remitting, filing, storing data etc.

Hi @janniks,

We at Draftss.com are using 2Checkout at the moment. To be honest, 2Checkout isn't really great. The fees is pretty high with no good features. If there are good features, they are paid. Their transaction fees are also pretty high where we are currently paying 5.5% + 50c per transaction. The currency conversion rates are pretty bad too.

We tried shifting to Paddle. While the integration, documentation, features at paddle were pretty amazing. We started moving our customers from 2CO to Paddle after the registration and integration were completed. While we were in the process of moving all our clients (we had already moved half of our total clients) our account was abruptly shut down stating that Paddle categorizes us as Human Services and they do not support human services. Ironically, we verified this with Paddle customer support before signing up with them.

Then we tried moving to PayPal. Apparently, they have relatively lesser fees and currency conversion. I think they have the worst documentation, poor customer support, and literally zero features. We tried using Chargebee subscription manager on top of PayPal. But in order to do so, we need to enable "Reference Transaction" from PayPal. We cannot enable this directly from the Paypal Developer dashboard. To do this we require the PayPal team to enable it for us. The customer support directs us to the technical team to get this resolved, and the technical team redirects us back to customer support to get this resolved. I am not sure if we are too inclined to go ahead with PayPal anymore.

Stripe is currently in Private Beta in India. Knowing Stripe being the best provider out there, we tried to get into their Private Beta program. But bad news again. They seem to charge exorbitantly high fees of 4.3%+2% resulting in a total of 6.3% fees on total transactional value. They do not support any third party services, yet. They accept credit and debit cards but do not accept Amex cards currently. Which is kind of a big no-no for us to get started with Stripe.

I'm using paddle to power https://groupleads.net and it's working perfectly.

You did not mention which country your business is located in, which is the major consideration. I am guessing it is the USA, then :-)

My business is in the EU (Poland), which limits my options: Stripe is still not officially available. I use Braintree for credit card processing, which works, but is rather costly, because the way they are set up for payouts means that I am unable to automatically link (batched) payouts to individual transactions (invoices). Because of that accounting costs more, because somebody has to manually assign appropriate currency rates.

My other reason for not liking Braintree is their "risk review" policy: if you are flagged for risk review, which will happen once you cross certain billing thresholds, they will block your money and start requesting various documents from you. The review can take anywhere from a week to months and you will have no revenue during that time. I find that aggressive and unfair.

As for invoicing, back when I investigated all the invoicing services, it turned out that none of them implement all my legal requirements correctly (EU+Poland) and I wrote my own invoicing.

One thing to note is that generating invoices isn't that difficult once there is a billing system in place. In my case, the effort of building and maintaining an integration with an external service would have been comparable to me writing the invoicing code. And I don't have to deal with customer data sync issues.

Hey janniks, i don't think we've got such payment providers where customers can set up their own payment and we can charge recurring.

We use our own solution, ChargeKeep.com, which uses Stripe to process the actual payment. Works pretty well for us, and we're able to do the things on your list.

Depending on if you're located in a country that supports Stripe, might be an option for you. If you're in a country where Stripe is still in beta (and you don't have an account) reach out and I can help.

Wave apps is something I use, Zoho has some good apps also, everything gets processed through Stripe.

I use Paddle for payment processing as they support PayPal and Credit/Debit Cards they support ebooks, softwares, and recurring payment by customers.

InvoiceNinja for invoicing.

We use Braintree via their Drop-In widget. The widget handles pretty much the whole interaction, at the end you get a token which represents the payment method and you use it to create a subscription via their API.

We've decided to go with Braintree mostly because it's one of the very few available in our country (Czechia) and also because it supports PayPal out of the box (you just need to link your PayPal business account from the administration panel).

As far as invoicing goes we use don't use any services, our accountant creates them by hand in their accounting software.

I'm using Zoho subscriptions - it's pretty good, tonnes of features, hosted payment pages, offers a portal for the user to manage their own account. So, you can pretty much plug and play, very little dev required, apart from tying into the API from your tool itself to verify subscriptions.
But, it is a bit inflexible. You can't customise the hosted page very much, and the back-end subscription manage has some funny little foibles. Nothing serious, though, and I haven't found anything better, apart from building your own custom solution direct with Stripe.

Stripe and PayPal for some things. Xero for accounting/invoices.