Payments in Australia are controlled by the so-called "big four" banks, and it's been difficult for a long time for startups to get merchant facilities to process credit cards online. Accounts cost hundreds of dollars per month, with high transaction costs and minimum transaction volumes thrown in.
We watched with teary eyes as companies such as Stripe launched and made it easy for developers to process credit cards, and kept struggling with the PayPal "API" with hope that one day we'd see Stripe in Australia.
I was excited, then, to see that Pin Payments have just publicly launched in Australia. They're currently offering a $9/month account fee, which isn't free but it's certainly ideal for small companies. After June 2013 this will jump to $50/month, so it seems to make sense to sign up now if you've got any medium-term plans.
Like Stripe, Pin offer a JavaScript Library for processing payments on your page without ever handling credit card details. This makes it much quicker and easier to implement.
Because I process payments in multiple places on WhisperGifts, I needed a reusable way to render the payment form and process the payment in a worker queue. The resulting code has been packaged up as django-pinpayments, which is still simple and in an Alpha state but it's a great starting point.
The code is released under the BSD licence, and I'd love to get your suggestions, comments, and GitHub Pull Requests.
A few things on the to-do list include providing Celery tasks out of the box, and providing tests & documentation. If you can help with any of these I'd be very happy :)
In the meantime, I'm about to go live with credit cards on WhisperGifts for the first time. I'll keep PayPal around as an alternative, but if demand is low I won't hesitate to turn it off. I can't wait.