A worthy developer-friendly alternative to PayPal

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!

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].

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.

Do you have an objection to using a standard gateway and merchant account? Your bank may resell Authorize.net, for example (I know Wells Fargo does), which has pretty much everything you're looking for. You will end up paying about $40/month in fees for both of these services.

I have used Google Checkout as a payment service as well, and it works fine.

Intuit has a merchant account offering out as well.

Moneybookers - http://www.moneybookers.com/

API Manual - http://www.moneybookers.com/merchant/en/moneybookers_gateway_manual.pdf

First Data

• Is international
• Integration is easy and developer friendly
• REST APIs
• Support for all mayor tender types (CC, DC, Gift, ACH, Lec, etc)
• Support for all mayor card companies (even European ones)
• Many different service plans that adapt to many needs (flat subscription, per transaction volume, per dollar volume, etc)

http://www.firstdata.com

You should probably consider Amazon's "Flexible Payments Service" too... I'm a fan of most of their web services. Not sure offhand whether payees must have an Amazon account to pay or not... but AWS services tend to be well documented:

http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

Take a look at SagePay. I haven't developed against PayPal or GoogleCheckout but the SagePay documentation from the knowledgebase is pretty good. SagePay also have a neat little testing platform.

Depending on your usage they can work our cheaper than PayPal and Google checkout.
http://www.zarr.com/Blog/2009/12/Summarizing-Paypal-Google-Checkout-and-Sage-Pay-as-payment-processing-programs/

Hope this helps

I'm a developer at Payjunction, so I recently looked at ActiveMerchant for Ruby (it can use Payjunction, PayPal, Authorize.net, and some others). If you are looking for a Ruby solution, I like their code, independent of who you use as an actual payment gateway. Don't have a recommendation in Python.