The time is here. After over a month of hard work, we give you “compliant ningo.me”.
After a very insightful conversation with the financial compliance expert Michael Kunz of compliance.ch, we realized that the way we had previously designed the inner workings of ningo.me, we were in fact indecently far away from compliant and legal.
With the simple idea of enabling a postage to send messages or a fee to visit a web page, we were naively assuming that we could simply let registered users buy credits, have them perform their transactions with credits, and finally reimburse them with cash for their credits. There’s nothing wrong with this – except for the last step.
When we pay cash for the credit points (or even if we allow this to happen on third party websites of the likes of ebay), we are basically a bank. We would essentially be managing other people’s money. And this, in Switzerland, is a far larger pair of shoes than what we are currently walking in.
So we had to decide: launch a platform where anyone could make money for us, vs. launch a platform where anyone could make money for themselves. The choice was clear: we want you, the user, to make money with your expertise, your personality, and your ideas. This decision meant a major overhaul of the entire platform and a deal with a service provider with a pretty bad reputation among developers: PayPal.
PayPal is currently the only company
- giving API access to user-to-user payments,
- covering many countries and currencies,
- available to Switzerland based business, and
- widely recognized and trusted by general internet users.
Stripe (the other, and much more developer-friendly option) is on its way, but not quite there yet. If you know of other service providers, let us know in the comments below!
I have been integrating PayPal payments with websites for many years, and was very reluctant to integrate with them again. This integration was going to be way more complicated than the donations and simple payments I previously used.
So I first tested PayPal by throwing various support requests at them. And … I was surprised and impressed by a previously inexistant speed, quality, and service orientation. I became more confident and did start to integrate.
I got fantastic support. I was intrigued and heard from the support folks that indeed, the atmosphere and attitude had changed a lot with the new CEO, David Marcus.
We did find quite a few corpses from the past on the way, however. Without the personal support, complex PayPal integrations are clearly impossible at the moment. The documentation is unbelievalby chaotic, inconsistent, confusing, and incomplete. There is room for improvement, and they are improving a lot – keep on going, PayPal!
Finally, I am happy that PayPal does all the financial heavy lifting for ningo.me. Here’s the impact for you and the other users of the ningo.me platform:
- You can earn real money directly through your addresses and profile pages: your postage and fee settings are in real currencies. Set it to Euros, Dollars, Hungarian Forints or whatever you prefer.
- All payments are directly processed through PayPal. Spend and receive money straight from and to your PayPal balance. There is no additional purse at ningo.me.
- You must have a PayPal account to earn or spend money at ningo.me.
And here are a few important hints about using ningo.me with PayPal:
- Beware of the currencies: You will only receive payments in the currencies you hold at PayPal. Read PayPal’s documentation on how to add currencies to your account.
Example: If you have a PayPal account in Euros, you must set the currency on all your postage and fee settings to Euro. Otherwise, the payments will fail and you will not make any money. - Beware of the currencies: The issue is a bit more complicated if you expect revenue through our referral program: You will only earn the rewards from payments in currencies you hold.
Example: if you get John to join ningo.me, and he sets a postage of 10 US Dollars, you will only get your cut of any payment if you hold a US Dollar balance in PayPal. Read PayPal’s documentation on how to add currencies to your account. - Rewards go to your default PayPal account: Rewards from users you bring to ningo.me are paid to the PayPal account set as default in your account settings.
- The PayPal email address you are using to earn and spend money through ningo.me will be visible to the other parties. The other parties are any combination of the sender, the receiver, the one who earns a reward, and the ningo.me platform. This means you might run the risk of being contacted through that address in the future. The best countermeasure to take is to add a ningo.me address to your PayPal email addresses and set the postage (and fee) on that address to a prohibitively high amount (1000 Euros, for example). ningo.me was programmed in a way that only emails from PayPal are exempt from the payment.
So: go ahead, start setting up payable email addresses for premium support, premium access to your inbox, consulting services, and make money with web pages with special and valuable content.
Your feedback is welcome. Comment below, or contact us.