Product Brief: Moneybookers.com

Moneybookers Merchant Services
http://www.moneybookers.com
112 Lee Valley Technopark
Ashley Road
London N17 9LN
United Kingdom

Here's an alternative to PayPal centered in the UK and catering to international merchants. They offer two main products.

• Email Pay. Sellers advise buyers to make the payment payable via the Moneybookers system to any of the merchant's registered e-mail addresses. No integration is necessary. A fee of 1% (capped at 0.5 Euro) is paid by the payer/buyer, not the merchant/seller.
• Merchant Gateway. The customer makes the payment on Moneybookers' secure webservers. He is automatically redirected back to the merchant's website once the payment is complete. Integration consists of pasting HTML payment buttons onto the merchant's webpages.

Customers can pay the merchant immediately via credit card free of charge, even if they are not yet registered with Moneybookers. Merchants pay 2% on all transactions. Payments that are directly taken from the customer’s credit card are subject to a fee of 5% (verified credit card) or 8% (unverified credit card). The customer is advised to have a mobile phone ready to allow for an instant transaction authorization during the payment process.

Moneybookers works with many currencies and four languages: English, German, Spanish, and French. Funds can be added to the Moneybookers account by e-gold or may be wired to the Moneybookers Ltd. account at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Germany. Adding money by credit card was grayed out when I examined the system.

Money can be accepted in the following currencies at present: Euro, British Pound, US Dollar, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Czech Koruna, Danish Krone, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, Israeli Shekel, Japanese Yen, Malaysian Ringgit, New Taiwan Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Krone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Slovakian Koruna, Swedish Krona, Swiss Franc and Thailand Baht.

This does provide a payments system for some countries that can't currently withdraw money from PayPal accounts -- Czech, Hungary, Malaysia, Poland, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand). But this system seems cumbersome, since funding an account requires either a wire transfer or validating a credit card transaction by means of a phone call. Without low-cost bank transfers or simple credit card payments, the system is crippled.