International E-Commerce?

March 16, 2005 6:03 PM

I helped a friend set up a couple PayPal buttons to sell some things online, which worked great until we ran into a new kind of customer: the international. How can people outside the US who don't want/have Paypal accounts buy her stuff online?
posted by paul_smatatoes to technology (6 comments total)

Maybe you could elaborate on what the buttons that you set up can do, and what you want them to do.

My advice given the information that I read above: Use a credit card with Paypal instead of setting up a line into a bank account with Paypal. This is what I do - I live in Canada and buy through Paypal that way. Does this help?
posted by seawallrunner at 6:33 PM on March 16, 2005

If you have a business account, Paypal will let you accept payment from anyone who has a credit card, Paypal account or no. Look up "Paypal Account Optional" in their documentation.
posted by ubernostrum at 7:08 PM on March 16, 2005

What makes you think PayPal is any harder for people outside the US than within? They accept Mastercard/Visa/Amex/etc, which are global, plus various kinds of European debit card. I imagine the subset of people who want to buy stuff online and don't have access to one of these is pretty minute.

You can search the AskMe archives for various threads about PayPal alternatives, but as I recall there aren't really any that aren't equally as bad and/or just as much hassle.
posted by cillit bang at 7:29 PM on March 16, 2005

I used to work in fighting fraud for an ecommerce company... To be honest, I'd recommend staying away from international orders unless you're willing to loose the merch and eat everything. It's just playing the odds. The easier you make it to place an order (read: online ordering) the more fraud you'll get. Money Order is the only way to go for international orders. You could look into Amazon's Honor System but really, you'd be dealling with the same international fraud issues as with credit card or PayPal orders
posted by pwb503 at 8:51 PM on March 16, 2005

Well, I'm just going on what my friend wrote to me, which was: "so we have to international people who want to subscribe but don't have american money or paypal accounts. how do we do this?"

I think I have the answer, though, which is to just say: Paypal! I'll see if my friend can just get those people to work with it sans account.
posted by paul_smatatoes at 9:15 PM on March 16, 2005

It is a bit more difficult to set up a paypal account in Europe, as you have to make a $1 payment and wait for your statement to get a code from the bill, then give paypal the code. It takes awhile.

And FYI: plenty of American merchants refuse credit card orders from overseas. While this is technically against the visa/mc TOS for merchants, they only take action if there are a lot of complaints against a specific merchant.
posted by Goofyy at 10:03 PM on March 16, 2005