I would suggest looking at Recurly as your integration endpoint for a few reasons:

1) Multi-currency. Some people claim it's "expensive" as as $200/mo add-on, but the extra conversions from geo-targetting visitors with their native currency make this a no-brainer, especially for UK companies.

2) Data portability. You can leave Recurly in 5 years if you want to write your own recurring billing app or switch to somewhere else and they will give you your data.

3) Not having your customer's CC details held at the gateway (Recurly are best described as a value-add intermediary) means you should be able to easily switch out gateways later on. This is a key architectural choice that I don't think people pay enough attention to, and Recurly really don't promote it enough. Chargify etc do not do this, instead they store your customer's details at the gateway and have no power to retrieve them ever again.

4) Supports VAT.

The down side to Recurly is their API is a bit messy. Their hosted payment pages and "transparent API" appear to be next to useless if you want to also record extra information (e.g, username) as part of the signup process in a seemless way.

With regards to payment gateway, pick any payment gateway from here: http://recurly.com/features/payment-gateway-support

The truth is, it really doesn't matter. As long as it is working, and your bank/merchant account doesn't put a hold or delay on your income.

Don't stress about the transaction fees. People get too hung up on a percentage point, with the frame of reference that "when we've got $10m in revenue, that 1% is worth $100,000)", but honestly, when you get to that point, you will have enough business savvy to re-negotiate or look for a better deal then. When you don't have any customers, it really doesn't matter.

Apparently FlowApp uses Recurly too. So it is possible to make this look nice :)

We lost $750 of sales (50%) in our first month because we didn't think Amex was important. It turns out that Amex is the card of choice for US businesses.

Had zero trouble with Payment Express (known as Direct Payment Solutions to the UK banks). Only thing that is maybe not ideal is the time difference, Payex. are in New Zealand and so email-threads can take several days if you don't ask questions at 1am.

Works fine in the EU!

(WireCard AG is a German based credit card gateway owning a "full" bank license. It's also a public traded company regulated by strict German banking regulations)

    setup 149,00 EUR (seems to be negotiable)
    monthly 19,00 EUR
    per transaction 0,25 EUR + 3,45% (Visa, MC)

just ask their customer support and tell them, that you will use recurly.com which means less technical trouble for all people involved (PCI compliance etc).

Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.

Once you lose a merchant account for CB rate (consistently above 1%), you'll never get another again, since all banks/MSPs check the TMF and MATCH file and will see you've been terminated in the past. Both your business information and the social security numbers of all principals of the business will be blacklisted for life.

You might be interested in the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days". PayPal is one of the founding stories covered. The only reason PayPal is here, where so many other payment services came and went during the dot-com boom, is that they tackled the fraud problem. There were times when PayPal was bleeding over $10 million a month to fraudulent activity. They are, in effect, the largest payment fraud management company in the world.

There's a lot of really great companies in the space, I think we offer something unique. (www.simplifiedecommerce.com)

Get to market fast

- Get started within a day, without long complicated merchant account applications.

- Copy & Paste integrations with "Buy Now" links

- Instant security and PCI Compliance - Merchants never touch sensitive data

- Easy recurring subscription billing and one-time payments

- Customizable hosted payment pages that match your website and branding, with no CSS knowledge required.

- Simple straight forward pricing that includes everything in the payments stack.

Grow without limits

- Built in Affiliate Marketing

- Portable data from day 1(all customer data is stored in our level 1 PCI compliant tokenized vault)

- Add your own merchant account any time - we're a gateway, certified and integrated with most US and some international processor networks

- Switch merchant accounts seamlessly - all your data, reporting, integrations, custom payment pages, affiliate relationships... remain intact.

We have a history of over 10 years in the payments space, contact me anytime if you have any questions- colin at SimplifiedEcommerce.com

"I have developed https://subsify.com/ which is a service filling the gap in recurring payemnts for UK and EU business. We currently support SagePay as Payment Gateway, which will fulfill the needs of most people. I would encourage anyone struggling with recurring payments in the UK to get in touch, we will probably be able to help you out."

No direct experience with the service but same guys that offer Fastpring (non recurring) which I recommend!

However, to use them you need to be able to disable CVV checking using PayPal's "advanced fraud management filters". The same applies for Recurly and other similar services AFAIK.

Unfortunately PayPal wouldn't let us do this as we don't have enough trading history etc... so until we get a merchant account we're having to use PayPal's own recurring billing APIs.

We'd love for there to be a viable alternative to PayPal, Stripe's API looks gorgeous in comparison.

We're in the Netherlands (like you?). Hit me up on twitter or our blog if you need any more info.

Supporting a local payment method (iDeal in our case) is a pretty big deal in our case, since it accounts for +50% of our total revenue. Don't underestimate this if you're planning to launch a European SaaS business!

Especially the broad support of payment methods is crucial, and pretty much makes up for all of Adyen's shortcomings in the implementation department.

What laws stop companies like Stripe, Recurly etc from easily launching in the EU?

Works OK for us, but could be better if you see Stripe for example.

You still have to have a merchant account; but, you have the potential to save 2-3% of each sale, since you will be dealing with the payment processor directly.

I have not had a chance to try them out, though. Maybe someone has some experience to share?

I understand that the rules are different and that most of the banks here are probably old-fashion, but isn't there a way to work around al those problems?

You have to register with a state, and Delaware seems to be the preferred one, as they're basically a tax haven. The Liechtenstein of the US…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027066

Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the need unmet by the service you're cloning. This worked great for LoveFilm in the UK, who cloned Netflix.

There is just no way to protect "your business idea" unless you deliver + expand fast. If the German copy-cat industry is faster, you just lost and have to pay a lot (groupon).

I personally don't like copy-cats but that's the way it currently goes.

I'm not quite sure about the rest of Europe, but payment options in Germany are generally quite different. Credit cards are getting more popular, but most transactions are done via direct bank transfer, often via a debit card. Wasn't that popular in the US, at least where I worked. So if you're selling something, just working out a deal with Visa and MasterCard isn't enough, as a lot of people won't be able to pay that way. Some web shops here have a huge amount of different payment options, credit cards, direct transfer (via a number of different companies), mobile phone payment (yuck), paypal etc.

European startups would be more used to it, but start with a smaller original userbase, and thus less money available to expand.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the EU prevent this. Isn't there laws in place to standardize things?

Of course there are provisions in place that make it easier for the banks to communicate, as this is in the interest of the banks themselves. That doesn't instantly revoke every odd tax law that came up in each country over the course of a few hundred years of financial history…

Yes, it's possible for me to wire money to anyone in Europe, if I run through a few hoops. And, well, it's not that much harder to wire it to the US or Nigeria.

That doesn't mean that this is the approach you want to take with a customer. You want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money, so it would be great if you'd accept the preferred way to do that in his native country. And as I wrote above, not everybody's preferred way is via credit cards. Never mind that there's still a number of different currencies…

The EU (and esp. the Euro) made it much easier. That doesn't mean it's easy.

It's not a big deal for corporate / professional deals with largers sums, i.e. a monthly €49 subscription. But if you're running some kind of browser game and want to get one-time €2.99 payments, you'll have to deal with a rather different demographic. Have yet to see an internatinal (at least pan-European) service that provides a good solution for that. Most of the time you have to cobble it together from all different local providers, and a lot of them look quite fishy to me (and that's saying something in that market).

The overarching theme is that the payments industry is much more complicated than it seems to the layman. There are a ton of players that you have to interact with, and they are a different set from country to country.

The payment systems are surprisingly different on the backend in each country. The US is large enough where it makes sense for us to create integrations into all of the different backends to work with all banks/processors. To do it in smaller countries might not make as much sense. We have to tread carefully because we need to ensure that our partners are great. That is something we can do in the US because our partners are a known quantity. Not the case for us abroad.

We also want to be able to provide adequate support. There is even a timezone hurdle. We provide phone support and it would suck to get calls at night.

Another part is just honestly the US market is so large and we still have room to grow here and add awesomeness that it is hard to prioritize going somewhere else. That being said, we are pursuing it because there is OBVIOUSLY a huge need there. We are still in beta so we're still working on the core product. Simultaneously we're working out a solution for the EU (difficult) and Canada (not as difficult).

Other issues include taxes, currency and currency risk, taking payments, etc. There's a lot to think about there. We really want to do it, but to do it right requires a lot of thought, and we just haven't done it yet.

If you have connections to folks that can help, please drop me a line (email in profile)

BTW, if you are interested in geeking out about how processing works (in the US), here's an ebook: http://feefighters.com/ebooks/what-is-credit-card-processing...

Obviously there are a lot of people that seriously want to make this happen. So isn't there a way to help you make this work and organize something to gather information about these subjects per country?