Mollie is my favourite alternative to Stripe for EU-registered businesses. They support nearly every payment methods relevant in the European context (including AmEx, PayPal, iDeal and SEPA debit) and their fees are very competitive. In this article, I share my experience with Mollie and explain how to open an account.
My experience with Mollie
After using Every-Pay exclusively for nearly two years to process payments on Freedom Surfer, I decided to look for a more flexible solution that would also allow me to accept Apple Pay, AmEx, PayPal and direct bank transfers. Of all the options I found, Mollie looked the most promising (Stripe was a close second but the lack of PayPal support was a bit of a deal-breaker).
It took only a few minutes to open an account and it was active and ready to go a few hours after I provided a copy of my ID and some details about my business. Activating the payment methods I needed was equally easy and fast.
For obvious reasons, I had to link my business bank account to receive settlements. Unlike Stripe, Mollie requires that the bank account be verified by sending a transfer TO Mollie. As such, it needs to be a real bank account (as services like TransferWise use pooled sending accounts).
Speaking of which, Mollie settles daily with a rolling weekly reserve (meaning that payments processed today will settle next week).
I have now been using Mollie for a decent amount of time and overall, I am very happy with the service. I would even go as far as to recommend it over Stripe due to the variety of payment methods it supports.
How to open an account
To open an account with Mollie, your business must be registered in a supported country. At the moment, only EEA countries are supported. It must also be low-risk and must not sell prohibited products and services.
As part of the account opening process, you will have to provide a copy of your ID and some information about your business (including the URL of your business website). Do note that in order to be approved, your website must have a privacy policy and a terms & conditions pages. It must also have a refund policy and list all applicable sales terms.
Once approved, you will have to enable the payment methods you want to use. This is done in the settings menu / payment methods.
