Now I'm shocked with $1200 setup fee + $25 transaction fee and business plan. Although this sounds like an opportunity for another startup to shake-up that old banking industry.
I'm curious how other Australian startups did it. GoodBarry, Atlassian (well, when they first started out). Theoretically, they're employing the same freemium model. Cheers, Hendro From: Dave Cheong Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 10:50 PM To: silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com Subject: [SiliconBeach] Re: Which payment gateway? Hi all, As already mentioned, I only recently implemented credit card processing for FormBinder and I did it with eWay/NAB. This eWay/NAB combination allowed me to: - charge in USD - handle recurring payments - retain full UI control - handle variable amounts (eg user changing plans) - deal with an Australian institution According to my research, NAB is currently the only Australian bank that deals with multi-currency. NAB has a $1200 setup fee, but I wasn't required to have the $5000 USD deposit. There is an additional $25 transaction fee every time I want to transfer money to/from the account. Access to my USD merchant account is possible either by going to a branch (yes, physically in person) or via their "National Online" software. This software requires a Windows machine (works on my Bootcamp Mac) and a 56k dial-up modem. CBA also have a product that deals with USD, but it is in beta and not opened to the general public. You need to have large transaction volumes in order to be eligible for the beta, and I wasn't able to meet the criteria. eWay provides a SOAP/XML api to create a managed customer account (ie credit card) and handle payments. Recurring payments is done via a monthly scheduler from my end which invokes the api periodically with the managed customer id and the payment amount. The integration to the gateway and my code was relatively simple (1-2 days of work) but the admin and paper work associated with getting setup and compliant was unnecessarily painful and drawn out. The main things they look for are: - SSL - About us - Contact details - Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy - Refund Policy - Business plan (revenue projections, transaction volumes) Both eWay *and* NAB require separate accounts for every currency supported. This isn't a problem for me as I only deal with USD, but this is clearly not a scalable solution if you're looking at expanding to other currencies. If you're reading this in complete shock, you're right. I can't believe that it is 2009 and Australia doesn't have a viable payment gateway solution to support online/recurring services. We can talk about growing the startup community via Silicon Beach all we want but the sad fact is Australia doesn't have enough support structures in play to make it easy to start an online business. Happy to help if anyone has further questions. Dave Cheong d...@mobiusly.com Mobiusly Pty Ltd FormBinder is a zero-fuss service to help you create surveys and forms, configure their look and feel and host them online to collect data. It's super easy and fun. You don't have to be a whiz at technology, install any software or worry about hosting, security and backups. We take care of all that. All you have to do is type in your questions, choose a theme, tweak some colours and start collecting data. http://formbinder.com On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Mark Mansour <m...@stateofflux.com> wrote: I'm in the same situation and I've just started my investigation into this (so my info may be a bit off - can someone comment on how right it is?) My requirements are: * customers pay in USD * recurring payments - I'm providing a subscription service * full control over the UI Retaining full control over the UI is important to me because you lose a lot of people between initiating the checkout and completing the payment and I want to do everything I can to smooth that path. It also means that I need to be PCI compliant which is a security check to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid with credit cards and that my system has been security hardened to an "acceptable" level. I think security hardening your site is good practice to the PCI compliance is not a big deal to me. I'm pretty hesitant to use the NAB solution because (and I'd love this to be wrong, can someone verify this?) * The multi-currency facility fees are higher than I think is reasonable: * $1200 setup fee * annual fees of (28 + (7 + 22)* 12) ~= $350 * transaction fees of 10c +4.3% * their "advanced financial management software program" is managed with a WINDOWS DESKTOP CLIENT (they explicitly don't support Apple or Unix OSs) and doesn't use the internet. It instead requires something called a 56k modem. * It also requires a USD$5000 deposit to open the account (do you need to maintain this as a float?) On top of this I believe you also need a gateway to hook up the NAB Internet merchant facilities. I haven't costed these solutions. The other solution I've been looking into is WorldPay (owned by Royal Bank of Scotland). They too are not cheap but: * standard account setup fee is 0 (well, it is waived on a promo deal) + $280 for the recurring payment feature * $430 annual fee * transaction fees of 16c +3.95% * for the first 6 months (i.e. until they trust you are not a scammer) they hold your money for 4 weeks before you can get to it. Worldpay acts as both an internet merchant facility and a gateway provider. I did some very quick calculations and both WorldPay and NAB end up costing the same (very roughtly) with the exception of the setup fee where there is about a $1000 difference and the requirement for gateway provider for NAB. I've started a spreadsheet with some very rough calculations and made it editable by anyone. If anyone is keen to add to it then that would be great. http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rUI9-mGk4vfNVDUC4MRELHg Does anyone have more info on this? Mark On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Kai Waldon <kai.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: Is this including HSBC? Thanks for info Guys On 11/05/2009, at 4:04 PM, Hendro Wijaya wrote: Hi, Thanks all for the reply. This community rocks! =D No, I haven't setup any account yet. To give credit, our model is similar to Mobiusly' FormBinder (Dave Cheong). They're using NAB with eWay. I might go with that path too since I heard that NAB is the only bank that deal with multi-currency. Regards, Hendro twitter: hwijaya -------------------------------------------------- From: "Rolf" <sonnen...@gmail.com> Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 2:17 PM To: "Silicon Beach Australia" <silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com> Subject: [SiliconBeach] Re: Which payment gateway? Hi Hendro, Do you already have an Internet Merchant Account with your bank? Some Australian banks don't allow you to charge in US dollars. So check that first. We will only trade in Australian Dollars and decided to go with eway. Setup was easy. We also investigated Netregistry and liked their pricing (flat fee, regardless of volume of transactions) but they couldn't work with our bank, which was the deal stopper. Regards, rolf brandsExclusive. Kai Waldon -- Mark Mansour m...@stateofflux.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself: http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/99938a0fbc691eeb To post to this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
