Posts Tagged ‘payments’

I’m pleased to announce my new course, Stripe Payments in PHP. It’s a 90-minute course that covers Stripe Checkout, API, Elements and Stripe.js: all the options you may want to use for integrating Stripe Payments into your website.

There are a couple of Stripe courses out there already. But a lot of them haven’t been updated for years and that is a problem because the EU is currently bringing in new some payment regulations across Europe called “Secure Customer Authentication”. This is a two-factor payment authorisation system in which your bank will text you a code (which is why your bank or credit card provider may have been nagging you to update your mobile number).

This course is fully up-to-date with Stripe’s new SCA-compliant APIs, as well as covering digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Here’s the trailer:

PayPal are quite restrictive over what they think is appropriate and inappropriate uses of their service (ie, they just don’t like certain industries), so if you work in those industries you have to use someone else. Someone like Payza.

Unfortunately, if Payza aren’t a scam operation, they seem to be doing their very best to look like they are.

Earlier this year, AlertPay (the original name of the company) re-named to Payza – because re-naming is always a good sign things are going well. Whenever I have filed support tickets with them it has taken weeks for them to get back to me, and indeed getting verified look literally months!

Elsewhere, there are no shortage of complaints. Google has loads of results for Payza sucks, so much so that the operators of the company even felt the need to start up PayzaSucks.com as a counter site. They also have dozens of complaints registered on the Better Business Bureau .

Then, today, they sent an email round saying that they were stopping all deposits to UK based accounts. It said they would notify us when this was back online, but failed to provide any timescale for this – days, weeks, months, ever? Who can run a business on this? It felt very much like when Fult Tilt poker had their licence suspended and ultimately closed.

If they are a legitimate company, then there are some serious questions that need answering…

• Why does it take them weeks to respond to support requests?
• Why do so many requests for support go unanswered?
• Why have they repeatedly lost their licence or payment processing abilities?

Clearly, you can’t run a business on a payment processor that emails you with 12 hours notice that they will be disabling your ability to receive payments, especially when it comes with no indication when, or even if, the functionality will ever be restored.

No wonder MasterCard shelled out a third of a billion pounds for DataCash, they’re probably the closest you can come to a trusted online payment processing provider.