I actually use ip2location's demo page as well. I put together my own api that grabs ip to location data from the 4-5 sources that provide the information for free, and then look for similarities. So if a (city, region, country) is present 3/5 times, it defaults to that. If they're not any similarities, it will default to maxmind geoip2's demo (if it hasn't already used up the daily free lookups). And then cache it all of course. Works well for the limited amount of lookups I need.

I haven't thought about making this a for-profit project yet. Maybe a paid API in the future, but I really want to offer an accurate & free option that's up to date.

Re: CC's, I'm also based in Europe (The Netherlands) and also hate services that only allow credit cards.

Thanks for the link regarding diffs, I'll definitely give it a read.

Contra to the other posters requests for paypal,

I refuse to have a paypal account, and recent changes to how they process payments mean I can't just pay with a cc without having an account.

If you are accepting payments, it might be a good idea to have more than one payment processor.

Especially if paypals notoriously badly timed account suspensions might force a existential crisis for your business.

Why is paying with credit cards hard for Europeans?

I can only comment for Finland, but at least here it is not so common for people to have company credit cards. If you want to buy something for the company you then either need to find out the person who has the card or use your personal credit card. Both options are bit cumbersome.

Getting the person who has the card to enter the necessary card details to a web site is not always convenient. On the other hand passing the card number, cvc etc to many people in the company has certain risks associated with it. Using personal credit card is painful, especially with monthly fees, since you need to do all the paperwork to get money from company.

Usually the credit card invoices are not enough for the bookkeeping. You need to have more detailed record about what was purchased and about the VAT included in the price. With shared company credit cards somebody then ends up chasing the actual receipts, which happen to be in somebody's inbox.

In most cases it is just so much easier to handle things with invoicing. The invoices are handled electronically and usually companies have systems in place which allow the accounting department to just pass the incoming invoice to whoever for approval.

A quite good solution this would be a virtual credit card service where somebody could assign "virtual cards" to whoever on the company and put specific monthly/yearly limits on those. It would be pretty nice to add the collection of receipts to this one as well. So the person responsible for specific virtual card, would also upload the invoices that match to the payments made.

Because the majority don't have/want credit cards.

I'm European and I'm yet to find a credit card field where I can't put my debit card number. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

Debit card number is not your IBAN, right? Because that's the only number on my bank card and it never works (because all forms want your "credit card" number, I thought).

Oh, no, it's not your IBAN. It's a number that looks like a credit card number, but the card it points to is actually a debit card.

What kind of credit card form doesn't allow debit cards? I've never seen one and been shopping all over Europe, both online and in person.

Oh, you mean you mostly use non-VISA/MC debit cards like we do in Canada? (we have Interac)

how do you pay for things online?

In Belgium something called MrCash is popular, The Netherlands has iDeal supported by pretty much all banks. Other than that: bank transfers, direct debit, or third-party things like PayPal (or in my case, Bitcoin).