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Samwers Clone Stripe
- aristidb 14y agoThat's a bit bizarre, because one would expect a German clone to support the payment variants that are far more popular than credit cards in Germany. EDIT: The biggest payment variant I was thinking of is direct debit (German: Lastschrift), which is highly convenient. However, wiring the money before getting the goods is also surprisingly popular here. Many people just don't have credit cards. (I do, but I also use some US services like Github which only allow credit card payments.)
- rmoriz 14y agobecause nothing works like a credit card. e.g. the popular direct debit payments can be charged back very easily + you just have to search for an valid account number (= fraud). The only payment method that works with recurring and more or less "final/instant" transactions is credit card. So there is no alternative for SaaS or in-app-payments to credit cards (or some direct debit risk mitigation business like paypal)
- white_devil 14y agothe popular direct debit payments can be charged back very easily + you just have to search for an valid account number (= fraud). This sounds highly doubtful. Care to explain?
- rmoriz 14y agoin Germany, direct debit transcation currently need an account number and a bank id (BLZ). Or BIC/IBAN (see Wikipedia). There is no validation except some nummerical tests. You can enter the number of some charity or your landlord when doing an order at e.g. Amazon. To deal with that risk, every bank account holder has the right to chargeback transactions without giving a reason. That's why banks typically keep a lot of the money you invoice for a grace period of approx 6-8 weeks. And companies like Otto have their own credit check companies… tl;dr if you instantly deliver items or services, direct debit is not safe.
- Luc 14y ago> There is no validation except some nummerical tests. You can enter the number of some charity or your landlord when doing an order at e.g. Amazon. That is... simply not true. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are saying. There isn't a bank in the EU that will allow you to make a transfer from an account that's not yours (authenticated by whatever means - card readers, digipass, RSA keychain gadgets that display a new number sequence every minute, etc.).
- rmoriz 14y agodirect debit ("Lastschrift") is kind of a reverse transaction. You tell your $own bank to collect the money from an account of your customer at $other bank
- Luc 14y agoOh right, I see, my mistake. I didn't know Amazon used this. In Belgium it's only used (afaik) by 'trusted' institutions, like utility companies. And as a customer you still need to authorize them the first time.
- pgeorgi 14y agoCharge back from credit cards works just fine, too. And using it with either banking system gets you in rather serious trouble if you're found to abuse the charge back mechanism. Safe payment methods are advance payment (since there's no reason to allow someone to charge back an order they've explicitely placed at their bank) and cash on delivery (though that's expensive). Which is why some large merchants (eg. Neckermann) restrict payment options to these two for the first transaction.
- mhd 14y agoYep. Without direct debit, I don't see this working as a single source payment solution, and if you have to add some other API for the missing solutions anyway, this becomes much less enticing.
- eddie_the_head 14y agoI am curious what the alternative but far more popular payment variants in Germany to credit cards are.
- lacerus 14y agoDirect debit and instant wire transfer are very big in Germany. Many places, especially supermarkets, do not even accept any credit cards but only debit cards. Our checking accounts have evolved very differently to the US - nobody has been using cheques here for years, even before the internet is was all debit and wires.
- eddie_the_head 14y agoAre the wiring rates low, relative to other countries around Germany or otherwise? How are wire rates for wiring money from say the UK? Who are the primary wire transfer companies in use in Germany? Thank you for your time.
- aristidb 14y agoFor individuals, wires are free. Businesses pay a few cents per wire. However, wires need about 2 days to process. That's the rates _from_ Germany to any EU country. So I wouldn't pay for a wire to France, but I don't know what a French person would pay to wire to me. The regulations only say that EU wires need to have the same price as national wires.
- silvestrov 14y agoHowever, wires need about 2 days to process This is how you pay: the bank earn the interest rate for those two days.
- netrus 14y agoThat's less than 0.1 percent. I guess most people would accept higher tranfer fees to speed up the process :)
- lobster_johnson 14y agoDoes the German direct-debit system work with online payments? We have the same direct-debit system in Norway, called BankAxept, which is managed by a consortium of banks; banks typically issue cards with both Visa and BankAxept built in. However, BankAxept does not work with online payments. A new system, BankAxess, has been launched for online payments, but it has not been widely implemented yet, so most online stores offer payment by Visa/Mastercard. Visa/MC's fees are somewhat exuberant, so most stores also offer COD and payment by wire transfer as alternative options.
- blumentopf 14y agoDirect debits as a buyer: You enter your bank account number in the "buy" form of some website and that's it. Direct debits as a seller: You file the direct debit with your bank. This can normally be done online through a web interface or various APIs (e.g. HBCI). The transaction is then processed through the Eurozone's TARGET2 system, i.e. the amount is withdrawn from the buyer's bank account and credited to the seller's bank account. This works in the entire Eurozone and is supposed to not take longer than a day. In practice, some countries take longer. E.g. I've seen payments between Germany and Italy take 3 days, but between Germany and France or within Germany it always takes 1 day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2
- majani 14y agoThe Samwer bros are probably building to sell to Stripe, so they're using credit cards for Paymill to easily integrate into Stripe when that time comes.
- tzaman 14y agoThat's actually great news, why would Europeans have to wait for an undisclosed date Stripe gives (or rather, doesn't give).
- timruffles 14y agoI agree, it's been a long time coming. Might be a pain for Stripe but competition is great for everyone else.
- drsim 14y agoI was initially appalled when I first read about the Samwar clone factory. Now I agree, in cases like this they're filling a gap in the market.
- rmoriz 14y agoThe only gap is, that Recurly and Spreedly were not able to tell the EU founders that their service is available and working perfectly fine with European payment gateways. They all have JS and REST-APIs and a lot more: - http://recurly.com/ http://recurly.com/ - http://spreedly.com/ http://spreedly.com/
- tzaman 14y agoYeah, but the problem is you still need a gateway, whereas with Stripe/Paymill, everything is included. Luckily, Braintree now supports EU as well.
- rmoriz 14y agoYou want a local, independent gateway and acquirer anyway (same jurisdiction, language, support…) which both Spreedly.com and Recurly.com support with http://www.WireCard.com/ http://www.WireCard.com/ In bad circumstances you don't want to lose all your payment infrastructure e.g. if paymill or stripe go out of business/have issues. That's why dealing with 2 parties may look odd but in the end it is worth the effort. If you have problems paying the 50-100$ monthly fee, then your business is the problem. Not your payment partner. (WireCard is a profitable, public credit-card processing bank, the chances that they go out of business is much lower than VC driven payment startups. See http://www.wirecard.com/investor-relations/ http://www.wirecard.com/investor-relations/ for details. They do CC-payments for Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa. >11 Billion Euro/year)
- Nikkki 14y agoStripe is now in hot pursuit ;)
- rmoriz 14y agoLooks like they're a PHP shop and only offer PHP client libs yet. Seems they didn't even understand the message Stripe has in kinds of developer focus. Also: Why would I use a payment service of the biggest copy cat company in the country? To deliver them my revenue numbers on a silver plate so they can decide if they should "enter my market"? They don't even openly publish the upcoming fees and just want you to "vendor lock-in" (or dig around to find the transaction fees somewhere hidden on their site). really sad :(
- andreasklinger 14y agoThe reason why you might consider it: Payments are still a very annoying topic in Europe. (imho)
- methodin 14y agoI think that's an important point. They are successful because the American-only companies typically take a while to move into foreign markets, if ever.
- emilw 14y agoI don't mind comments getting down voted, I understand it. But this comment is down voted while it conveys a valid point. Please take a step back and try to take view this from a European (non UK) standpoint.
- eitland 14y agoThe first few examples I saw where all JavaScript or Curl. Are we reading the same thing?
- arkitaip 14y agoWhy would you even care if they are a copy cat or not? Surely what matters is things such as delivering on promises, reasonable prices and quality of service. As an European I can tell you that no one is going to wait years for a valley startup to establish itself in Europe when there are sufficiently good alternatives right here and now.
- andy_boot 14y agohttp://www.izettle.com/ http://www.izettle.com/ Have been around for a while too
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seanmccann 14y agoThat's a square competitor. Still awesome nonetheless.
- andy_boot 14y agoActually these guys are like Square not Stripe - getting my payment companies confused.
- seanmccann 14y agoI think this is great! I assume Stripe didn't have imminent plans to launch in Germany anyway. Looks like they have a rate of 2.95%, which is pretty good. Especially for outside the US.
- seivan 14y agoWill never be as good as Stripe. Mostly because Stripe is coded by it's founders, get support questions answered by their founders who will even teach you how to use git. :)
- richardw 14y agoThat stuff is great, but doesn't help EU customers if they can't use it. So at present this thing is already better than Stripe, because "90% of success is showing up". The repeated message from EU countries is "get here, we need you", and the repeated answer is "we'd love to, but can't yet". That's handing the business to Samwers on a silver platter. I'm in South Africa. I can't even begin to imagine how long it'll take Stripe to get here. (btw, didn't downvote you)
- NonEUCitizen 14y agoYou should start the South African Stripe ?
- adrinavarro 14y agoNobody cares about that. Customers will care whether they can have service at all in their country. If Stripe isn't there, then others will take over. It's all about business, not who's the nicest guy in town.
- furyg3 14y agoFantastic. Maybe this will put some fire under Stripe to launch in Europe...
- helipad 14y agoOnly seems to support German bank accounts at the moment (not any European) - though they're not terribly difficult to open.
- rmoriz 14y agoconsider alternatives: - http://recurly.com/ http://recurly.com/ - http://spreedly.com/ http://spreedly.com/ + WireCard.com as gateway/acquirer. Works for all EU countries.
- simonbrown 14y agoalso: http://chargify.com/ http://chargify.com/ https://cheddargetter.com/ https://cheddargetter.com/
- rmoriz 14y agoto my knowledge Chargify does not support a Euro-based gateway.
- hnwh 14y agoI'm a french citizen, do you know what is required for other EU citizens to open a german account? E.g, In the UK its a nightmare, but in Spain, it seems easy
- Kudos 14y agoYou also need a German business license.
- webignition 14y agoThis is great news. I'll be adding subscription payment options to my UK-based startup in a few months. I'd love to be able to use Stripe and I hope that the introduction of Paymill brings Stripe support to the UK more swiftly. If not, I can use Paymill.
- Gring 14y agoI don't get it. Why do US net startups very often make the same mistake of not expanding into the whole world quickly? It took eBay something like 4 years to go to Germany, by which time there was a local clone there that proved to be uncatchable. The expensive result was that eBay had to buy the clone (Alando) for 43 million dollars to become relevant. Kickstarter is still US-only. Stripe as well. So are countless others. We're not talking about products that you need an huge infrastructure in the country. This is mostly about translation, and not explicitly prohibiting things. The expenses seem miniscule to the possible upside. So why do all those fancy startups hold themselves back?
- niyazpk 14y agoYou are vastly underestimating the effort required in setting up a payment gateway in a country.
- Gring 14y agoWhy? It's just some contracts and APIs. And it doesn't explain all those other startups that deliberately limit themselves (and then later have to buy local clones because they did not expand quickly enough).
- niyazpk 14y ago>> just some contracts and APIs Again, you sound like a very optimistic person. :) In reality, contracts make forever to set up, and it's better not to talk about APIs from commercial banks. Whenever monitory transactions are involved, you will have to confirm to a huge amount of regulations and conditions to meet which you will have to get involved with even more bureaucracy. Coming from India, I am sad to say that I have got a fairly grim perspective about these things.
- lowmagnet 14y agoIt takes us about a week to get another account established in the target currency and set up an account with our payment vendor to take orders in that currency. Translating the site to the target country takes longer than establishing another currency.
- gawker 14y agoNow that Europe has had this, where's Canada? Am I still stuck with PayPal as my only viable option for payments?
- estel 14y ago* Germany has this. Doing payment processing in a range of countries is hard.
- gawker 14y agoMy apologies for the mistake. Yeah, it's hard which is why I think the brothers are just doing a great job of exploiting opportunities.
- mooism2 14y agoStripe's Canadian beta started within the last week -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355507 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355507
- herval 14y agoOn a related note, they also cloned Square in Brazil and Europe (payleven.de/.com.br)
- mjbellantoni 14y agoThey've even copied someone's logo! http://www.launchbit.com/
- Carioca 14y agoWell, in their defense, the Samwers' incubator is called Rocket Internet, so it's more like they're copying themselves. http://www.rocket-internet.de/ http://www.rocket-internet.de/
- lobster_johnson 14y agoI don't see the Samwers' names on any of the Rocket Internet pages. Are you sure they are connected? Edit: Never mind, googling "rocket internet samwer" shows a lot of connections. Still surprised there is nothing on the Rocket Internet pages.
- aquaphile 14y agoThere are _so_ many payment startups, so Paymill is the least of Stripe's worries. Just an ad-hoc list that have been recently funded: Approve.io Ogone Zuora Recurly Stripe gocardless.com (Royal Bank of Scotland) blinkpay/blinksale (no funding) Buck (fka Billing Revolution) Gumroad Dwolla Braintree ZenCash WePay Bango Clover PayOne (fka PaymentOne) Isis (verizon, At&t, etc.) Fee Fighters' Samurai Bump Pay BeamIt LEaf Dynamics Corduro Paydici Jumio Paymetric MiCash HelloWallet iZettle Card.io PayLeap BluSynergy PayTap Payleven TraxPay MineralTree CurrencyCloud Square LevelUp ZipMark Paymill
- biafra 14y agoBTW: Payleven is also a Samwer (Rocket Internet) incubated company. Payleven is obviously a Square clone.
- nemesisj 14y agoI wrote a blog post asking for this to happen in the UK awhile back. http://peebs.org/free-business-idea-for-a-united-kingdom-start http://peebs.org/free-business-idea-for-a-united-kingdom-sta... Glad to see it starting to happen in Europe!
- dudurocha 14y agoI would love a Stripe Clone in Brazil. It's really annoying and expensive to set up payment in web apps here in brazil. Somebody knows what would take to clone a startup like these? Besides money?
- r3m6 14y agoEverybody is taking about Stripe. But how is Stripe different from existing/established services like Digital River or Plimus?
- ExpiredLink 14y agoThis just a payment provider like many others. The only difference I see is that they use a 'REST-like' API instead of the usual Web-Service API.
- ojr 14y agoThis is a beautiful twitter bootstrap site...
- shell0x 14y agoSure, startups & companies should operate worldwide, but the Samwer business model is really scummy. I could understand if they would build the clone with the background to avoid monopols, but they just try to fill a niche market with a stolen idea and make money with it. Just look at http://www.lazada.com.my/ http://www.lazada.com.my/, an amazon clone for countries, where amazon doesn't operate(d) yet. They even use the same layout. I wouldn't say that cloning something is bad in general, if your main focus lies on the extension of an existing idea, but the Samwer brothers nearly copy the idea 1:1 without innovation and creativity and sell it to the mother company later. Thats a really bad motivation for the real entrepreneurs, who try to be innovative. Startups should really start worldwide, to avoid that these copycats make further money with their ideas.
- therandomguy 14y agoYou are assuming that all businesses should innovate. That is not true. Mostly businesses are about execution and price. Samwer is playing by the rules and winning.
- yen223 14y agoAs a Malaysian, I know more people here who use Amazon.com than those who use Lazada.com.my, even though Amazon doesn't technically serve our country. Branding and the first-mover advantage are very important.
- nathan_f77 14y agoWell, that was inevitable. I don't care if it's Stripe or someone else, I just want a service like this for New Zealanders.
- ascendant 14y agoThere are two types of people commenting on this. Those that obviously understand what it takes to become a payment processor in foreign countries, and those that can't fathom that there's more involved than just opening a bank account in said country.
- nekopa 14y agoFor people thinking about international expansion as just translation: beware, here be dragons. When I moved (back) to Europe 8 years ago, I used my web skills to help make some extra money on the side (I'm an English language teacher because I love it, but it doesn't pay for holidays and toys :) and there is so much more to developing multilingual sites. Think more along the lines of multicultural. That color on your call to action? That's our color for cowardice. Ед завыл бела два won't fit on that button. (sorry to any Russians here, I just typed out randomly on the keyboard, but it illustrates the point) most of our customers like to go to the post office to pay for products; oh, and our country's POs are still based on old communist operational principles. This is without all the different regulatory matters involved. Try iterating quickly when a country's national bank has to vet all the founders to issue the proper licenses... International expansion can mean a lot more than just translation. [edit] formatting
- newlogg 14y agoThe Samwer's are effectively a tax on innovation. They contribute nothing new, only cut into the potential profitability of web innovators
- g8oz 14y agoThey are delivering value to people around the world. Those people now don't have to wait on the expansion plans of companies which don't have globalization built into their DNA. Also they are a live example of what relentless execution looks like.
- biafra 14y agoBut they are here in Germany where Stripe is not! So for us germans the do contribute.
- nasmorn 14y agoIf I get to repeat a patio11 by integrating them they might earn me a lot of money. Also how innovative is Stripe really. They provide a service that is fairly obvious when you worked with Paypal or a large bank. The point is providing the service is a lot of hard work, thats what we pay them for. The mere idea of payments should not suck this hard is not their business. It is actually depositing your customers money in your bank account and frankly they don't offer that in Germany.
- s04p 14y agoI'm not a big fan of the Samwers, and try to avoid using any of their services. And this time I might end up using their service. I simply have no option. This is not only proof of their lightening fast execution, but also how all others fail. German/European startups: fail. None of them were interested to get into this space. They all want to become the next payment / mobile solution and all had no interest about serving the biggest platform- web. Stripe: fail. I know how startups work. I know that expanding is not easy. But they have raised $20 Million. You could pay a local team of 10 a year, and would have not even spent 5% of your funding. There is just no excuse. German developers wanted stripe BADLY. German / European banks: total fail. They completely lack of any vision, and are busy enough staying alive.
- habosa 14y agoThe best part about Stripe is, and has always been, their amazing understanding of developer needs and their top-notch customer service. No copy-cat can provide that at the same level as Stripe. Helping a website accept credit cards is only half of the equation.