Ask HN: Best credit card gateways for non-US (specifically UK) businesses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best credit card gateways for non-US (specifically UK) businesses?

26 pointssjtgraham7 comments

Dear HN,<p>As an entrepreneur not based in the US, I am experiencing tremendous difficulty in finding a credit card gateway with a reasonable API that also supports credit card tokenization to streamline PCI-DSS compliance (a la Braintree's "Vault").<p>Am I just going to have to bite the bullet and reincorporate in the US? If so, I am worried about double taxation as I have been advised HMRC tax offshore companies as UK companies where the directors are resident in the UK?<p>I am interested in hearing how others have managed this problem.

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Seems as though a lot of the PCI-DSS compliance is based on your merchant level http://www.rbsworldpay.com/pcidss/ not sure if that helps? Also PayPal Website payments pro https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render... and NoChex http://www.nochex.com/ may be worth looking into?

To be absolutely honest I'm not 100% sure what you're asking! We use SagePay for most of our payments (but also Worldpay for others) and they are both good. Not sure if they provide everything that you need though.

In terms of offshore companies, there are various ways around what you want, but you need to take good legal and accountancy advice in terms of where to incorporate and how you achieve it. It is possible though.

Sorry, I might have been clearer! Thanks for your suggestions.

I just need a merchant services provider that has decent gateway API, and some way of storing credit card details with the gateway returning an arbitrary string as a reference to the stored card details, so that they can be used for repeat purchases of arbitrary sums, i.e. not a subscription model. Essentially I don't want to assume the responsibility of storing my customer credit card details in order to avoid the expense of the additional PCI-DSS compliance steps required.

I wanted to use Braintree, as they have well written client libraries, and the tokenization feature I need, unfortunately they cannot offer merchant accounts to non-US businesses, but partner with Chase Paymentech in the EU who have an absurd $5MM minimum volume requirement.

I looked at SagePay as they have a similar facility to Braintree's vault for storing credit card details, but it looks that one of the required fields for that API call is the cardholder's name. My app is accessed via telephone, so all data captured is numeric, (long number, expiry date, and billing zip).

It's so frustrating, it's the only thing stopping me from launching… the ability to accept payments!

As soon as someone comes up with a Braintree for the UK I'm in. We're going to launch paid plans in the not too distant future and have had a hell of a time trying to find a merchant account. We've ended up going with Recurly and PayPal's Website Payments Pro (UK).

Hi Paul,

Comforting to hear I'm not alone here. Maybe if enough of us let Braintree know there is demand for their services in the UK/EU, they might prioritise it. Naïve I know but worth a shot? How hard would it be for them to liaise with another MSP, e.g. Barclaycard, Streamline, etc for the merchant account bit?

info@getbraintree.com

p.s. Geckoboard is awesome!

I'm looking at exactly the same issue now.

There are a few specialist one that only work in particular sectors (software sales, in-game sales), but the two general ones I'm looking at are Worldpay and Nochex.

These guys look good - http://eta.devpayments.com/

Don't know if they can help non-US merchants though.

Edit: Looks like they noticed this post and turned off access. They haven't launched fully yet.

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