[schtono]

I should elaborate :)

There is afaik no service, that offers a nice and easy payment integration for small e-commerce websites. Of course you can get all the heavyweight stuff with merchant accounts and so on. But if you're a small garage-shop which wants to accept credit card payments, there is no alternative to paypal (at least in germany).

I think there's no need to mention here how much the payment process of paypal sucks anyways, as it has been discussed here already extensively.

Within my own little company, I've estimated that we loose about 30% of our customers in the last phase of checking out, where people are on behalf of paypals website. As far as i've seen, amazon does a much better job here.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i think you dont even have to open an account with pasword and stuff to checkout using ur credit card?

[qeorge]

You can let customers pay with a credit card while using PayPal as your gateway. If you're willing to pay the $30/month and setup SSL you can take CC payments on your page using the PayPal gateway, with no account needed by your customers.

PayPal still sucks, but if you're losing a lot of sales to the PayPal signup this might be a quick fix. I should be able to dredge up some PHP code if that would help you out.

But I hope Amazon Payments comes to Europe soon. Its silly to have so little competition in such a high-demand field.

[schtono]

Well, there actually there are 3 things that make me mad about PayPal:

(1) Bad process (users have to create accounts/ passwords before they can checkout)

(2) Rejection of some credit card numbers (happened to some of our customers, due to their PayPal's security measures - the cards worked on other sites)

(3) Blocking of merchant accounts (happened to us twice. Only way to resolve the issue was entering my drivers license + id number, which were not accepted - spent several days trying to get it fixed by phone)

You're absolutely right that one could probably avoid issue (1) by choosing their $30 plan and integrating it into our own website. But I am pretty sure (2) and (3) will still apply, which is nothing but horrible if you are a small business.

Another question: Does anyone have an idea why there is no competition in the market so far? I suppose there must be kind of regulatory issues, although they must be even harder in the US where there is competition.

[AND thanks for your code-offer - I think I'll get that done on my own anyways ;) If not, I'd be happy to get back to you ;))]

[qeorge]

Absolutely, (2) and (3) are unacceptable. Here's hoping Amazon is better and comes to Germany soon.

Regarding the lack of competition, I found this article very interesting:

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/22/the-man-finally...

The author's argument is that the US's "Know Your Customer" regulation is the bottleneck. In his words: "KYC since it was introduced in the late 90s as a requirement has been the single most destructive concept for innovation and startups in the financial space."