PayLane, the European online payments company, is expanding to Germany — it already operates in Poland, UK, and Ireland — accepting payments in 160 currencies from over 50 countries. But where the Polish company tries to stand out from the crowd is with its focus on the idiosyncratic nature of each local European market by supporting a number of alternative payment methods. Along with credit card and PayPal processing, PayLane supports things like Sofortbanking in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, wire transfers in Poland, Dankort in Denmark, Carte Bleue in France or iDEAL in the Netherlands. It also claims to be particularly startup-friendly with a dedicated offering for companies who have no processing history and might be denied by other providers.
In addition to the list of supported currencies and countries from which payments can be accepted and processed, PayLane provides plugins for popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento, OpenCart, osCommerce, Zen Cart, PrestaShop, or even WordPress. It also supports single-click (i.e. credit card details stored) and recurring payments, which is useful for companies with subscription-based business models.
As for its startup-friendly touted credentials, in addition to helping newly founded businesses get their first foot on the online payments ladder, including helping them set up Merchant Accounts, PayLane has launched DevZone – a dedicated area of its site for developers that delves into the technical side of how to integrate its online payments solution, including sample code in PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Python and cURL, along with detailed instructions, business cases and demos of transactions.
The company has an interesting background. Entirely self-funded, PayLane was founded way back in 2005 by Simon Grabowski (the CEO of GetResponse and ClickMeeting), but for the first 5 years existed almost entirely to support its sister companies, operating without customer service and marketing activities. It wasn’t really until 2011 that PayLane began to offer its online payment services to other companies. Today, its clients include names such as GetResponse, ClickMeeting, Survs, Esponce, and Nozbe.
That said, PayLane faces plenty of European competition, such as Sagepay, Ogone, and Worldpay. Meanwhile, U.S. and heavily backed Braintree recently began targeting this side of the pond.