Is it really a good idea for a foreign startup to setup a US company just because of handling recurring payments for international customers, even including the factor of US tax?
There are only 4 banks in Egypt that offer a payment service for online merchants, none of which you'd be happy dealing with in terms of up front fees and quality of the service offered.
We steer away from 3rd party payment service providers like Alertpay/Moneybookers because of the normal disruptive UX (redirecting customers). But those 4 banks are a magnitude worse.
Most of MENA based startups that accept payments online have subsidiaries in UK, USA or Canada.
One of the payment methods we use is Playspan from VISA - http://playspan.com/ . Their UI is not that bad (they open HTML popup instead of redirects), and if you plan to support alternative payment methods,they have tons of them. They should probably accept your Egyptian company.
I was hoping someone would point out this issue. It's not just Egypt. Colombia suffers from the same luck. The real question is: What alternatives do non-paypal countries have?
