Payment Providers Overview

Key factors to consider when choosing and setting up your payment provider.

Updated over a week ago

Summary

While Stripe is our recommended payment provider, it may not be the best for everyone using our platform.

We offer an alternative to Stripe depending on your situation, Authorize.net. You can read more about this option in this guide.

NOTE: Please note that we do not recommend changing your payment provider after you have started accepting payments. Please consider all of these factors with your team to make an educated decision based on your business needs.

    1. The Presentment Currency

    2. The Settlement Currency

    1. The geographical location of your primary market

    2. The country of your payment provider account

    1. Nature of the content or business practices

    1. Payouts schedule

    2. Destination of payouts

    1. Google Pay

    2. Apple Pay

Currency Factors

The Presentment Currency

Presentment currency is the currency in which the customer is charged. Some presentment currencies require using a local payment provider account (i.e., having a Stripe account set for the country related to the presentment currency) to reduce the rate of declined payments. Depending on your currency, we recommend consulting with Stripe directly about the viability of setting up a local Stripe account.

For instance, if your primary market is in Mexico, you may want to set up a Mexican Stripe account.

We support PayPal as a secondary payment provider - which means you must also have a primary payment provider set with Uscreen to use this option. Our integration with PayPal only supports payments in AUD, EUR, GBP, and USD.

The present currency of your store will determine where you need to base your Stripe account and whether you can use our PayPal integration as a secondary payment provider.

The Settlement Currency

Settlement currency is the currency a vendor (i.e., you/your business) selects to be the currency for received funds and the currency in which the vendor receives the funds.

Geographical Factors

The geographical location of your primary market

When your clients use cards issued in a different country than where your Stripe account is registered, some issuing banks may not process the charges. If this happens, your clients will need to contact their banks to authorize it, and then retry the purchase.

If you have clients concentrated in locations around the world where issuing banks are more strict with international payments, you may want to set up local Stripe accounts and Uscreen sites in your larger markets.

Please get in touch with our Sales Team about pricing to set up multiple Uscreen sites. You can reach them by email at sales@uscreen.tv.

The country of your payment provider account

Stripe is available for businesses in 47 countries.

Video Content Factors

Nature of the content or business practices

If your business is part of restricted business from using Stripe services, but the nature of your content does not violate Uscreen's Publisher Terms, you may want to use Authorize.net as a payment provider.

Payout (Receipt of Revenue) Factors

Destination of payouts

Suppose the destination of the payouts is part of your criteria to choose a payment provider. In that case, you may want to consider that payouts from Stripe can go directly to your bank account. However, you will receive your payouts from our PayPal integration on your PayPal account.

If you have more questions about payouts, please check our help guide about the Payouts Schedule.

Additional Features

Stripe Tax

Stripe Tax works only with their Checkout feature. Our integration with Stripe doesn't use it and, therefore, is incompatible with Stripe Tax. We invite you to submit a feature request to see this feature on our platform.

Exceptional Situations

In some exceptional situations, our clients need to integrate a payment provider externally with the help of a web developer.

Please consult the following help guide for more information: Create a Custom Payment Provider Integration with Stripe Checkout and Zapier.

For instance, India is among the countries with the highest rates of online payment fraud. In August 2019, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently put in place various safety and security measures for card payments, including the requirement of an Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA), especially for "card-not-present" transactions.

As of April 1, 2021, issuing banks in India have started to block transactions that do not comply with these requirements.

The RBI has issued an extension up to October 1, 2021, to comply with requirements for some existing recurring payment arrangements set up before April 1, 2021.

You should see little to no impact on one-time payments from Indian cardholders due to this regulation.

However, you may see higher payment failure rates for recurring payments as issuing banks block recurring transactions that do not comply with the new requirements.

The original measures introduced by the RBI in 2019 include:

  • Requiring cardholders to go through a one-time registration process along with validation through an additional factor of authentication by the issuing bank

  • You must send alerts to cardholders at least 24 hours before charges take place.

  • The ability for cardholders to opt out of transactions is required.

  • Transactions over INR 5,000 (increased from INR 2,000) need to be authenticated each time.

Regrettably, our existing Stripe integration does not support all of the specific requirements of the Indian market.

NOTE: Our Product Team considers many factors when evaluating feature requests and prioritizing future feature(s) to research, plan, develop, and test. If you would like to have a solution for these exceptional situations out of the box, please submit a feature request so we know it's something you are interested in.


Choosing a Payment Gateway

Before selling your content, you'll need to connect your site to a payment provider which will allow you to provide your customers with a payment option and let you get paid. However, before you choose a payment provider, please consider which one would be best for you.

Uscreen supports credit card processing through Stripe and Authorize.net. At this time, Uscreen doesn't support additional payment options like Bitcoin, Alipay, etc.

If you do require these options, please read about our recommendation, here. Otherwise, if you'd like to see these options available on our platform, please provide your feedback directly to our product team, here.

You can choose between two primary payment providers: Stripe or Authorize.net. PayPal is an additional option that can be set up after you have connected to a primary payment provider.

Stripe

We highly recommend Stripe if you're in a country that Stripe supports. You're going to get instant payouts as customers make purchases on your storefront as Stripe handles all the heavy lifting with payments 💪. You'll have to be approved by Stripe during the signup process. To connect to Stripe, follow these instructions.

Authorize.net

Authorize.net has a broad range of merchants to which you can connect. To connect to Authorize.net, follow these instructions.

We only recommend using Authorize.net if you do not qualify for a Stripe account. If you are considering connecting to Authorize.net, you must connect a fresh/empty account. Accounts with existing user payment information may present a problem for your site, so we require a brand new account before connecting to Uscreen.

NOTE: When using Authorize.net as your payment provider, the Gift Card feature won't be available.

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