From stories I heard in the past, I was expecting a horrible experience (banks not being able to grok the concept of digital goods etc). Turns out that either the stories were a furphy or banks have gotten a lot better.
Here's the process I went through.
1. Application
2. Set up a single page website to give a brief overview of product
3. Include TOS and returns policy (adapted from wordpress.com)
4. Wait 7 days for approval
Thats it. One week to get a merchant account with no prior business history. The rates are fairly standard:
1.4%/trans, $33 monthly, $44 anual fee, $33 chargeback fee
I think off the top of my head those rates beat those provided by paypal, stripe, etc. although I'm happy to be corrected if anyone has up-to-date info about them
I'll also be paying $300/yr for gateway fees since I have no desire to handle CC details directly.
When we clarified that we required online payments, he chuckled and said 'oh, no way we do that, it is far too dangerous'.
He then proposed a compromise solution where we collect credit card numbers and then punch them manually into the terminal to process payments.
We ended up incorporating in the USA.
I ask because merchant accounts denominated in AUD are widely available, but for USD it still appears that only the NAB have multi-currency support.
To your question though.. no I cant bill directly in USD. I am very new (and ignorant) to receiving online payments, so I'm really curious what the issues for Americans are. The on-line currency converters are accurate to (I would guess) +- 1hour currency fluctuations so would give a very accurate estimate (to within cents) of the cost of a transaction... Wouldn't this be good enough?
Otherwise if this is an issue then paypal should do the job... 2 mins to set up and gives an alternative option.
Would be good to hear your own personal experiences.
It's a marketing disaster, in fact, and would look completely amateurish.
Paypal is never Plan A.
It could be (but I don't know) that while Australia is not too far from the US in terms of the legal/financial stuff, India is not so great, so it's worth going to the US in any event. For instance, here in Italy, I don't think that highly of the legal system, so there is a bit more incentive for some people to take the risk and go abroad like this. Of course, everyone needs to evaluate it according to their own situation.
Stripe/ Pin are great but still don't solve multi currency, Pin is offering USD and AUD, haven't seen any rates from them yet though.
As an Australian consumer I'm used to paying in USD and simply seeing a slightly different amount show up on my transaction history (AUD being generally at parity with USD)
Is having multi-currency support important? Does it impact sales? Is using something like money.js to give a close estimate of actual cost good enough?
Whereas the ROTW is pretty much accustomed to being billed in USD online and the impact is far lower.
For me, for my market, AUD+USD are mandatory and optionally GBP/EUR are a strong plus.
I think it helps with localised branding. Sure we are really just one website, with one shipping location (and we aren't hiding this fact). But displaying GBP prices and charging people exactly that price, in the currency they are used to, without any international transaction fee popping up makes a difference.
This, along with creating a local phone number and physical address, gives the customers a better feeling that you are localised to their country.
Of course we haven't actually tested this both ways to see what the difference would be.
I haven't used it, but it seems to be Stripe-for-Australians...
Edit: now I've read your post properly I see you have seen Pin.
I considered a similar path, since here in Australia we are very similarly constrained[2]. However I was not willing to accept the risk and complexity of incorporating in an unfamiliar legal/financial jurisdiction and I really don't feel the OP has made me any more comfortable although they seem flush about it.
Since I have an alternative billing model available that will be acceptable to my customers, I've abandoned the whole subscription approach in favour of annual prepayments.
Instead I have added "solve Australian online service billing" to my list of possible future projects (not a pipedream, issuer/acquirer systems knowledge is in my utility belt).
The guys at Pin (www.pin.net.au) will, hopefully, beat me to it, and I wish them the best because it's a problem seriously needs solving for Australian startups.
[1] Neither Paypal nor Worldpay's recurring options are palatable to me - both are seriously underspecified, and are UX catastrophes to boot.
[2] There is one option available; there is one bank that offers USD-capable merchant accounts, and the signup takes months of paperwork, and has huge up-front and per-txn fees, at least huge from a startup POV.