International marketplace payments - any experience with Adyen or MangoPay?

January 18th, 2016

We're a UK-based language-learning platform, and we're choosing a payment processor. PayPal offers the functionality we need, but seems not ideal for international marketplaces as they charge a fee at every turn. We're leaning towards Adyen or MangoPay, as they both seem to offer a product tailored to marketplaces and much lower fees. Anyone have any experience with either, or have any related bits of advice they'd like to offer? Thanks!

Ogden Rattliff, MBA

January 18th, 2016

Have you considered Stripe? Sent from my iPhone

Randar Puust

January 18th, 2016

I would agree with Ogden and look at Stripe. They have supported the UK since 2013 (https://stripe.com/blog/introducing-stripe-uk). Overall, we've had a very positive experience with them in terms of integration and support.

Travis Wentworth

January 18th, 2016

Stripe appears to only pay out vendors (in our case, teachers) in 21 countries, and the full Stripe Connect (their marketplace product) functionality is only available in the US/Canada. For this reason I haven't looked in too much detail at Stripe's fees but generally I get the sense they're about the same as PayPal's. With PayPal, for example, you have to pay a cross-border transaction fee even if the payment is in the same currency. That's why I'm looking at more specialised payment processors.

Randar Puust

January 18th, 2016

Not sure what your timeframe is like, but:

https://support.stripe.com/questions/is-stripe-available-in-the-uk-uY32Pl

Anything Beta is always scary, but it might be worth a call to see what their timeframe is like. The only reason I'm suggesting is that our experience with them has been very positive to date in terms of their API, flexibility and support.

Is Stripe available in the UK?

Stripe Connect

Additionally, if you’re creating a marketplace, store builder, invoicing system, or anything else that helps users get paid, you can use Stripe Connect to let your users accept credit cards instantly by having them connect their Stripe account.

We’re currently testing the next iteration of Stripe Connect in private beta. The new Stripe Connect gives you, among other things, the ability to transfer funds received from credit cards to third-party bank accounts in any country supported by Stripe, while fully owning the seller experience. Please contact us if you want to give it a go. We’re regularly inviting people who express interest as we continue polishing the beta.

Travis Wentworth

January 18th, 2016

Thanks Randar, I didn't know they were piloting the Connect feature in the UK already. I've heard only good things from founders about working with Stripe but it's just not global enough - with Stripe we can only pay out teachers in 23 countries, and not all EU countries are on that list. Adyen on the other hand is used by Airbnb, so if it's good enough for them it'd certainly be good enough for us. I think MangoPay would work too, but it's a smaller company and while I like to support the startup, for something like payment systems it's riskier.

Daniel GEORGES CEO at CYBERservices SA

January 19th, 2016

Your project sounds interesting and innovative. If you want to benchmark Adyen, MangoPay or Stripe we can make you an offer with KLIK and PAY, please contact our sales dept +41216956360.

Daniel Berger Owner at MCC CODE

January 19th, 2016

You will have multiple providers that can help you achieve your necessities, Worldpay, GlobalPayments, WireCard, and so on.

Between the mentioned two, i would say Adyen is a solid provider with experience in similar structures as you describe, the downside will be how much day-by-day support you may need, not sure how fast they may be able to answer to your needs; if such is the case i would suggest a more boutique service provider for the extra care @ least on the initial stages

Stefan Vermeulen

January 20th, 2016

Hi Travis,

Thanks for pointing towards MANGOPAY. I am currently investigating some options for a service I am launching, and that one I did not see so far.. and is worth for me to investigate. Seems they are supported by a bigger group as well.

As for Adyen, I think they have a pretty neat service - but you need to already have a steady sales of 1,000 EUR per month if I understood well.

One of the services I hope to launch soon will go for a credit card only payment solution. There are quite a lot of payment providers for that. However, as e-commerce matured a shift has taken place outnumbering credit card transactions by regular bank account / debit card transactions. I think you should at least be looking at the payment providers offering those type of services.

If anyone in here has first-hand experience with 2checkout, I am all ears. Reading there pages I thought there service is pretty straightforward too.

Stefan

Jonathan Dradford Freelance SEo at Recharge It

January 20th, 2016

I would always go for paypal.

Travis Wentworth

January 22nd, 2016

Thanks everyone for your insights. BTW, I realised that Airbnb actually uses a service called Payoneer to facilitate pay-outs in more obscure markets. So I guess they have some kind of complex mash-up of Adyen, Payoneer and perhaps others.

This brings up a related question: how do people who live in more obscure currency markets feel about getting paid in different currencies, such as USD or euro? For example, say you live in Chile or Bulgaria etc., and we can't pay you in your native currency, would you be in any way used to, or happy about, receiving USD or EUR or GBP etc., and either keeping it in that currency or having your bank automatically convert it to local currency on receipt (possibly incurring a fee and/or a not-great exchange rate)?