A worthy developer-friendly alternative to PayPal [closed]

Question

I understand payments are a tricky thing, but I'm yet to find a worthy alternative to PayPal. I want to change from PayPal because I think they are expensive and it doesn't work in all countries. Furthermore, I think that the API is sufficient, but could be better. The API documentation, however, is total utter crap.

I am looking for a payment / transaction service that is more developer friendly, preferably with:

• A clean and well-structured REST API
• Excellent developer tools and a sandbox
• Good example API implementations, preferably in Python or Ruby
• Worldwide credit/debit card coverage
• Rates cheaper than PayPal (or the possibility to choose a payment plan)

I suppose Google Checkout is somewhat worthy, but it requires both the developer and prospective purchasers to have a Google account. Any other suggestions are very much appreciated!

Answer 1

Stripe fits a lot of your criteria — you can accept credit card payments without a merchant account. You also get to control the payment flow without having to worry about PCI compliance.

A clean and well-structured REST API

The API is based entirely on REST — you can even use curl to charge cards:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges    -u <YOUR_API_KEY>:    -d amount=400    -d currency=usd    -d "description=Charge for [email protected]"    -d "card[number]=4242424242424242"    -d "card[exp_month]=12"    -d "card[exp_year]=2012"    -d "card[cvc]=123" 

Excellent developer tools and a sandbox

You can test your payment form integration with test API keys before going live. More info: https://stripe.com/docs/testing

Good example API implementations, preferably in in Python or Ruby

Stripe has official libraries in Python, Ruby, PHP and Java, and there are more community-supported ones here: https://stripe.com/docs/libraries

Worldwide credit/debit card coverage

You can charge all international credit and debit cards with Stripe.

Rates cheaper than PayPal (or the possibility to chose a payment plan)

You pay one standard rate of 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Unlike PayPal, there's no extra charge for American Express or international payments. Details here: https://stripe.com/help/pricing

I am an engineer at Stripe. Feel free to drop by our chatroom if you have more questions. You can also email us at [email protected].

Answer 2

I find Klarna to be an very good provider.

They have an easy to use API and they also provide different ways of payments. They also provide a service to let your customers pay by invoice and let you get your money immediatly so Klarna takes care of actually getting the money.