Online payments in Latin America aren’t easy

When I was reading about it, I begin to understand this broad topic.

Online payments using payment gateways are excellent for people like us who want to sell services or products online.

But is not easy to register payments and put that in my bank without high fees and some hassle.

The hassle

Imagine you want to sell some ebooks online.

As you may know, there are a lot of ways to register payment gateways on your website. You have Stripe, Paypal, and a bunch of others.

Many of them also accept a bank transfer directly to your account.

But what happens when you aren’t in their countries supported list.

A lot of Latin American countries aren’t accepted. So you will need another type to do it.

Opening an LLC? Is it workable?

To avoid the hassle, you decide to open a legal entity in one of the countries that are supported.

But as you may know, you will need to pay taxes both in the country where you open your LLC and in your country.

One good thing is that here, I have territorial taxes, what it means is that I don´t have to pay taxes when I am selling abroad.

This matter is about selling services as a freelancer and selling SaaS subscriptions.

But opening an LLC for example in the United States doesn´t seem good at first. One good reason is, of course, the amount of money in taxes and payment gateways fees.

It can severely damage my income.

Some workarounds

Is there another way?

Well, you can do this, is to starting using the Paypal payment gateway and selling your services as normal.

Recently some banks are accepting to transfer your money from your Paypal balance to their bank accounts, then you can have the money in your country.

But imagine the bank is not the best for you, you can always transfer money from their bank to another.

After this, enjoy your money and retire in ACMs as you want.

I can´t say this is so easy because some banks put weeks to retire money. And you can imagine waiting to a certain day to retire.

The other is they cancel your PayPal account, then you can´t receive income this way.

If you freelance, there is more hope

If you are freelancing, then you can negotiate to be paid in other ways.

For example, there is Payoneer, Western Union. etc.

Payoneer offered a credit card you can use in your country and pay for things like the supermarket with it.

Western Uniongoings go and retire the money.

But when you need payment gateways are not as easy to receive in this way.

Reading more about it

I am currently reading more about the topic, and hope to have more answers in the future.

I live in Panama, a good way to research the topic is to read legal blogs where lawyers write about it in your country.

Some sites with content like this. Could be helpful to be more specific.

Of course, I recommend getting as much information as possible, to get to a very good decision.

Let's connect

Remember you can follow me on Twitter @fernandocutire, I am getting better at writing in English so we could talk there