But what is so difficult to make it available in Europe? I don't really grasp what the problems are. And is there any way we Europeans can help, besides saying that we want to use your service.
Every time there's a post on HN about a new business that's the new hotness but which is not available outside the US, there are a bunch of posts asking why. Here are some possible answers:
Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the need unmet by the service you're cloning. This worked great for LoveFilm in the UK, who cloned Netflix.
Addendum: And then very likely the most successful European copycats will get acquired by a the same US company when it really wants to expand abroad...
If they did something interesting, i.e. are worth acquiring. More likely, they still sit on a month-old feature set of the original and then are sued out of business – or just ignored.
There is just no way to protect "your business idea" unless you deliver + expand fast. If the German copy-cat industry is faster, you just lost and have to pay a lot (groupon).
I personally don't like copy-cats but that's the way it currently goes.
Probably the number of countries in Europe, each of which has a slightly different banking system (never mind the general legal system or language). If I recall correctly, a lot of web services in general aren't even easily accessible for Canadians.
I'm not quite sure about the rest of Europe, but payment options in Germany are generally quite different. Credit cards are getting more popular, but most transactions are done via direct bank transfer, often via a debit card. Wasn't that popular in the US, at least where I worked.
So if you're selling something, just working out a deal with Visa and MasterCard isn't enough, as a lot of people won't be able to pay that way. Some web shops here have a huge amount of different payment options, credit cards, direct transfer (via a number of different companies), mobile phone payment (yuck), paypal etc.
European startups would be more used to it, but start with a smaller original userbase, and thus less money available to expand.
There are lots of lawyers who make money just with that, never mind bankers…
Of course there are provisions in place that make it easier for the banks to communicate, as this is in the interest of the banks themselves. That doesn't instantly revoke every odd tax law that came up in each country over the course of a few hundred years of financial history…
Yes, it's possible for me to wire money to anyone in Europe, if I run through a few hoops. And, well, it's not that much harder to wire it to the US or Nigeria.
That doesn't mean that this is the approach you want to take with a customer. You want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money, so it would be great if you'd accept the preferred way to do that in his native country. And as I wrote above, not everybody's preferred way is via credit cards. Never mind that there's still a number of different currencies…
The EU (and esp. the Euro) made it much easier. That doesn't mean it's easy.
I can't remember seeing a web shop that does IBAN/SWIFT transfers (apart from one or two small-time ebay sellers). I pay via wire transfer all the time within Germany, but outside it's credit card or paypal (and even the latter quite often requires a credit card transfer for that).
It's not a big deal for corporate / professional deals with largers sums, i.e. a monthly €49 subscription. But if you're running some kind of browser game and want to get one-time €2.99 payments, you'll have to deal with a rather different demographic. Have yet to see an internatinal (at least pan-European) service that provides a good solution for that. Most of the time you have to cobble it together from all different local providers, and a lot of them look quite fishy to me (and that's saying something in that market).
Saying that you want to use our service helps us know that it is worth our while, yes... but in terms of issues, there are a few things:
The overarching theme is that the payments industry is much more complicated than it seems to the layman. There are a ton of players that you have to interact with, and they are a different set from country to country.
The payment systems are surprisingly different on the backend in each country. The US is large enough where it makes sense for us to create integrations into all of the different backends to work with all banks/processors. To do it in smaller countries might not make as much sense. We have to tread carefully because we need to ensure that our partners are great. That is something we can do in the US because our partners are a known quantity. Not the case for us abroad.
We also want to be able to provide adequate support. There is even a timezone hurdle. We provide phone support and it would suck to get calls at night.
Another part is just honestly the US market is so large and we still have room to grow here and add awesomeness that it is hard to prioritize going somewhere else. That being said, we are pursuing it because there is OBVIOUSLY a huge need there. We are still in beta so we're still working on the core product. Simultaneously we're working out a solution for the EU (difficult) and Canada (not as difficult).
Other issues include taxes, currency and currency risk, taking payments, etc. There's a lot to think about there. We really want to do it, but to do it right requires a lot of thought, and we just haven't done it yet.
If you have connections to folks that can help, please drop me a line (email in profile)
I understand that it's a hard thing to do and it might not be as interesting as the US market. But what is interesting is that the payment/bank industry is far behind on what people want. You guys, Stripe and BankSimple are a good example of changing that.
Obviously there are a lot of people that seriously want to make this happen. So isn't there a way to help you make this work and organize something to gather information about these subjects per country?
