The new homepage you dudes have is a big improvement. Why haven't you blogged about how you're previewing this stuff on GitHub? It's fun to watch a start up growing and changing there and I think it it's in really well with the MVP/agile mindset
It is great indeed. The only think that is not so cool for me is that the font rendering of 'Fanwood Text' is pretty bad on Win 7 Chrome 25.0.1364.97. But I love it. Just wish the font had a better rendering.
"Sellers/merchants must reside in the US, have a US mailing address and a US bank account. Buyers can reside in nearly all countries and use any Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover card (debit and credit)."
This isn't exactly a surprise, but I would really appreciate if you guys (and all the other payment processing services out there) could include this information a little more prominently.
Sorry about this -- we didn't mean to be misleading. What do you think we could do to make our country limitations more prominent on our homepage? https://www.balancedpayments.com/#processing
If your visitor is not in the US, add a red text or something that says exactly the quote from parent ? I too was looking for it and ended up reading the HN comment to find the answer.
Think about it this way: How would you like to find out that a really really rad service whose website you just found is only available in Liechtenstein and Iceland? That's how you want to present your geo-restriction.
What parent suggests is a great idea but doesn't work by itself, because it doesn't work for everyone. I for example am physically located in the USA but I am still only interested in services that work in Germany. In addition to that scenario, I know plenty of people who could be your target audience and who obfuscate their physical location through proxies and VPNs, usually in order to use US-only services.
I suggest you simply adding it to the text:
Accept credit cards and debit bank accounts for your US-based business. Proceeds are available immediately.
Notice the difference? If not, read again. Those who care will notice it, for all others it's two words they ignore.
When I click the submitted link, pretty much the first thing I read says this:
No PCI requirements
Balanced is Level 1 PCI certified, so you can pass card data directly to us without worrying about compliance.
I worry about services that say this sort of thing, because while they might well get away with it, it's still almost always wrong.
I happen to think it would be immensely foolish of organisations like MasterCard or VISA to crack down on the new generation of low-friction, easy-setup card payment services who are helping businesses to accept card payments with minimal effort, because I think alienating them would do severe damage to the long term viability of the entire business model of such card payment schemes. However, we are talking about dinosaurs, and if you do incur their wrath it can be very damaging to your future business prospects, so jumping through the (much lesser) hoops they expect for businesses that outsource their payment collection might still be a wise move.
> Balanced is Level 1 PCI certified, so you can pass card data directly to us without worrying about compliance.
That's a perfectly valid statement. Typically the capture is done from the servers of the IPSP, not on the servers of the merchant. Hence the 'directly'.
You're covered by at least some of PCI DSS the moment any card data hits your network, so I fail to see how a business can be passing card data to Balanced at all without incurring some level of PCI DSS involvement.
If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems even transiently, that's a more interesting case. Even then, a lot of payment gateways that offer "hosted" facilities do still expect their clients to file a basic PCI DSS SAQ in our experience.
(Just to be clear, I'm not expressing any views on how worthwhile or otherwise the entire PCI DSS scheme may be.)
> If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems even transiently, that's a more interesting case.
Balanced seems to be following a model similar to Stripe where the payment details are indeed sent directly to them (via javascript in the browser, for the most common use case), and it never touches the merchant's servers.
17 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadHere are some links to our docs:
1. Create a bank account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea... 1.1. You'll want to use balanced.js for this: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/overview?language=bash...
2. Bank account verification: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#bank...
3. Add bank account to an account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#addi...
4. Debit an account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...
5. Use callbacks so you know if the debit was successful: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#even...
I'll fire up a VM, check it out and try to find a good fallback or alternative for Windows.
"Sellers/merchants must reside in the US, have a US mailing address and a US bank account. Buyers can reside in nearly all countries and use any Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover card (debit and credit)."
This isn't exactly a surprise, but I would really appreciate if you guys (and all the other payment processing services out there) could include this information a little more prominently.
What parent suggests is a great idea but doesn't work by itself, because it doesn't work for everyone. I for example am physically located in the USA but I am still only interested in services that work in Germany. In addition to that scenario, I know plenty of people who could be your target audience and who obfuscate their physical location through proxies and VPNs, usually in order to use US-only services.
I suggest you simply adding it to the text:
Accept credit cards and debit bank accounts for your US-based business. Proceeds are available immediately.
Notice the difference? If not, read again. Those who care will notice it, for all others it's two words they ignore.
No PCI requirements
Balanced is Level 1 PCI certified, so you can pass card data directly to us without worrying about compliance.
I worry about services that say this sort of thing, because while they might well get away with it, it's still almost always wrong.
I happen to think it would be immensely foolish of organisations like MasterCard or VISA to crack down on the new generation of low-friction, easy-setup card payment services who are helping businesses to accept card payments with minimal effort, because I think alienating them would do severe damage to the long term viability of the entire business model of such card payment schemes. However, we are talking about dinosaurs, and if you do incur their wrath it can be very damaging to your future business prospects, so jumping through the (much lesser) hoops they expect for businesses that outsource their payment collection might still be a wise move.
That's a perfectly valid statement. Typically the capture is done from the servers of the IPSP, not on the servers of the merchant. Hence the 'directly'.
If what they actually meant was that customers would be sending their card data directly to Balanced and it wouldn't ever hit the other business's systems even transiently, that's a more interesting case. Even then, a lot of payment gateways that offer "hosted" facilities do still expect their clients to file a basic PCI DSS SAQ in our experience.
(Just to be clear, I'm not expressing any views on how worthwhile or otherwise the entire PCI DSS scheme may be.)
Balanced seems to be following a model similar to Stripe where the payment details are indeed sent directly to them (via javascript in the browser, for the most common use case), and it never touches the merchant's servers.