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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

I run an online Photo editor https://www.Photopea.com , where users can pay to get a Premium account. Everything goes through PayPal and users seem to be happy.

But PayPal has quite large fees. From a 9 USD payment, they take like 10%. Also, if you are not from the US (I am not from the US), you can only withdraw money in your local currency, and PayPal has quite bad conversion rates (you lose 2-3% again).

I am still wondering, that after so many years, no big company (Google, Facebook, Apple) came up with their competitor to PayPal (everybody would switch to them, if they had lower fees).

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>you can only withdraw money in your local currency, and PayPal has quite bad conversion rates (you lose 2-3% again).

Someone on HN recommended TransferWise for that purpose. I tried it and it works well: PayPal can transfer to TransferWise and then from TransferWise money can be withdrawn in local currency with a very fair exchange rate close to real-time Forex.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with TransferWise in any sense.

I used TransferWise many times and I am extremely happy with it. I have the USD account in the US through TransferWise.

The problem is, that my PayPal does not let me withdraw money to my US account, as I am not the US citizen.

Totally off topic, but Photopea is awesome. Thanks for making it - in my experience, nothing else compares when trying to convert a PSD to web styles.

Not affiliated, don't even have a pro account, but one of the neat things of HN is that you never know who you are chatting with.

> But PayPal has quite large fees. From a 9 USD payment, they take like 10%.

Isn't this because the flat fee is something like 50 cents, and you pay an additional ~3.x% on top of that?

Yes, I think it is like 35 Cents + 3.5% or something like that, end up being ~7.5%. And if you include other cost like chargeback etc and averaged out it is likely close to 10%.

Which is why I don't understand how Patreon operate at only 5%.

> Which is why I don't understand how Patreon operate at only 5%.

I don't have a Patreon account myself, but it seems like their 5% cut is separate from any payment processing fee that their creators incur: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606125-How-...

Not for the lack of trying. Google and Apple are trying to cut into payments from the platforms they own: phones. Amazon has been offering a payments service for a long time iirc.

You can integrate some local bank API for Credit Card Payment. it might not help much but 10-15% payment came from them and save your some money. I always suggest to have both options on website for coverage.

I am working on it at the moment, but it is extremely hard. You have to communicate with them (through email) and describe what you want to do. They have too many requirements (like you should have the icons of MasterCard and Visa on your website) and it is even harder to convince them to allow you accept payments from the whole world (they usually only let you accept payments within your country).

With PayPal, everything is automatic. You can configure everything yourself and accept payments in no time, without having to communicate with an actual person from PayPal.

In Spain, the setup process is the same as when you are asking for a pos machine, you usually have to open an account with them. You get the same conditions than with the pos machine, something like 0.50% and 0.25€ fixed price, with discounts if you have great volume.

So they just refused my application for a credit card payment gate :( without describing a reason why.

Looks great! What GUI toolkit/widgets do you use?

Thanks! I used HTML, CSS and Javascript.

> (everybody would switch to them, if they had lower fees)

i guess they have more profitable things to do than banking

Google has google wallet.

Apple has Apple Pay.

You can't create a merchant account from many countries in Google wallet. They are extrely slow with adding new countries.

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