Selling software - Payment processors

Over-viewing current payment handlers.

Which one do you prefer and why?

Worldwide fixed per transaction rate, cheap and very powerful api!

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As always I prefer Fastspring:

Pro:

  • really easy to set up
  • support is great with fast replies
  • I don’t need to take care of serial numbers etc., no license server

Con:

  • pricey
  • not very fast in regards to new features
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I’m also known to recommend FastSpring. I like them because they can handle my blunt emails, but usually do their best to help me get situated. This latest change with payout methods was a little hinky, and I still think it’s a scam by PayPal… but… they handle the taxing thing for me.

As I’ve no doubt drilled into everyone’s head, my complete end to end Xojo code licensing system TPLM is designed to be hooked into FastSpring nearly instantly. Should there be any issues in the future, my backup plan would be Stripe as they already process my consulting invoices.

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Stripe. Their fees are on par with the competitors but their APIs are super feature rich.

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I’m a fan of Stripe too. For most users (myself included) their Checkout feature is great, but doesn’t handle taxes. But you can code anything you wish with their tools. If you want to accept payments in your app, you can do that as long as you write the code to interact with their API. They offer terminals, physical cards, invoicing, subscriptions… pretty much everything. If you’ve got a need, Stripe can probably fill it if you put the work in. Besides their Checkout feature, just about everything gets done through their API.

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What does FastSpring charge? I would have to open an account to see the pricing???

They did the silly “you have to sign up to get pricing” a while ago. They charge 8,9%. Yes, this is way higher than other payment processors. But they do all the work. I set up my products and I end up with a payment page. I don’t have to worry about chargebacks at all.

I found this:

By default, your FastSpring pricing model will be 8.9% per order. We also offer a second pricing model, which is 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction and if you prefer to switch to this model you should let us know by opening a support request using the FastSpring Support Desk.

And looks like I pay something like 6.5% in average.

Fastspring is good for US customers. They charge in various currencies, convert all to USD and then pay out.
If payout is in Euro, you have a second conversion, which I avoid by using MyCommerce (Share-it) for Euro transactions.

Is the 5.9% plus $.95 still current?

I found the support at MyCommerce or whatever they are called not very good.

So I guess that means it does not include dealing with tax payments.

They handle VAT for you.

So define an item for $100 and they pay you about $91.1 or $93.15.
The customer pays $100 plus sales tax or VAT and they send it to the government.
About $116 in Germany currently.

I use Fastspring and am generally happy with them. I recently received an email from them about my site with an accompanying video laying out several ways to improve sales. I almost trashed it as spam, but since I already use them I replied and we set up a Zoom meeting. In the end we had 2 Zoom meetings, one with their web guy, and they helped me move my point of sale from their web store to my own web page (a pop-up store). No charge. So yes, they are a bit pricey (I believe I pay 8%), but they handle tax/VAT as mentioned above, and they provide extras such as hands-on help. I’m not as web-savvy as other on this forum so I appreciate that level of support.

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I’ve been looking at Fastspring, but my partner is leaning towards Recurly. Do any of you know anything about Recurly? Their rate is around 5%, but you also need an account with Alavara to handle sales taxes, in addition to a merchant account to do the actual collecting $$ from customers. My partner likes the Recurly API and found their overall fees (including Recurly, Alavara, and the merchant account) to be around 7.5%. He’s also concerned because your customer charge info is locked into Fastspring, whereas Recurly (and some others) let you switch to a different payment processing company without losing the customer charge info, if you find a better company.

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I know nothing about them.

It appears they’re just a license managing company, @Tim_Parnell has built a licensing solution in Xojo.

It may also be worth noting, that I do my own licensing with a custom solution built in Xojo web 1.0. When a sale is made, info is sent to my web app (running on 1701 Hosting), it then records the transaction and generates the serial number. This means I have a record of the transaction regardless of who handled the charge. So changing payment handlers, is a matter of creating a new account and setting up the webhooks.

We also use Recurly, but for subscription management and subscription portal services to our customers for our cloud apps. We use stripe with Recurly.

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Yes, this is one of the flows we’re looking at. Thank you!

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Interesting that you’re using both Recurly and Stripe. What do you do about sales tax and VAT?

We use Recurly to handle the user subscriptions which in turn creates the invoices in Stripe via API. Recurly is setup by us to use the correct user’s Sales/Use (only if its a state we pay into) and charges VAT --> Then sends to Stripe for payment. Our accounting department then handles paying the Sales/Use per state monthly and our 3rd party VAT broker pays our VAT quarterly.

FWIW We use recurly’s APi’s heavily also as we also automate our AWS Service instance spin up for our customers after Stripe has a successful initial charge. Here is a flow in order of API communication at a serious high level.

Web Sign Up Link to Recurly Portal on our behalf —> User signs up and provides CC --to Stripe —> If Its a trial then we validate CC Number then we pass back the auth info to Recurly —> Recurly then communicates to our AWS Importer to enroll this new customer — AWS runs a bunch of scripts and automates our Cloud instance for our customer —> AWS Tells Recurly state info —> Emails to go customer.

Knowing that Stripe has Subscription based services (feature wise) we dontt use it was we use Recurly to automate the invoice charges to Stripe and stripe processes it for the customer id that is passed.

We do not automate our sales / use tax payments as our company ONLY pays Sales / Use to three states and VAT.

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