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Comment by ilikerashers | Hacker News Reader

How is this news? Is it 2004?

I meet industry sales people who are baffled why some companies insist on Stripe despite the cost. HackerNews promotion is clearly a powerful force.

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I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. It's about the functionality, not the promotion. The whole premise of Stripe is that a richer, more powerful stack of APIs -- rather than the bare-bones electrical outlet to the credit card networks that existed before -- is a better solution for most businesses. Whatever success (and any recognition) we've had to date follows from that; not the other way around.

I wish something like Stripe existed in 2004. If it had, we wouldn't have had to start the company...

I'm a huge fan of Stripe and the benefits of using it, although I've had close to 40% of all international customers receive a 'your card was declined error'.

I've had to ask them to call up their bank/card provider and request for the restriction to be removed.

Is Stripe's ease of onboarding/getting started causing such a high rate of flagged transactions? What's going on behind the scenes between banks and payment services providers and is this something that could be improved in the future?

I’m sorry to read of your problem, but also glad to know it’s not just us. The last time I checked, we were losing more subscribers to mysterious international card failures on Stripe than all other causes (including deliberate cancellations) put together, but I’m talking about a small side business here so I wondered whether we’d just been an unfortunate statistical anomaly.

I did contact Stripe support a while ago to ask about this, but they didn’t seem to know any more than we did and weren’t able to do anything to improve the situation. The best theory we have so far is that given how many of the transactions fail in the second month of a subscription and the greater proportion of international failures compared to domestic, we’re coming in borderline on a lot of US banks’ fraud checks, perhaps because we’re abroad and charging in a different currency. Then when we don’t have the card security code after the first payment, maybe that pushes us over the line. We’re hardly a high risk business generally, though, so it would be interesting to know whether this problem is inherent to accepting international card payments or something more specific to Stripe.

Naturally we’re investigating whether general improvements we could make, such as charging in local currencies or better Dunning management, would improve the success rate. However, it’s hard to make sensible decisions with so little useful data about the cause of the problem, particularly for a business with limited development resources available that we’d rather spend on developing the service itself. In the meantime, I read these anecdotes on HN about businesses aiming for at least 95 or 98 percent retention month-to-month and dream...

Agreed. Payments has been a quite stinky industry with lots of dodgy monopolies (see government payment providers for particularly bad examples). I'd just like to see a more balanced debate on payments. Its a very busy industry with plenty of niches which Stripe clearly fits, but it's also a very boring industry. I get surprised seeing this heavily promoted on a site I use for opinion and news.

Uh, frankly, all you are offering is yet another credit card gateway. There are large countries out there where credit card usage is much much lower compared to debit cards.

So it's cool you're translating stuff, but none of it matters if customers can't pay. It's 2015, you need PayPal level of compatibility.

You mean Stripe should add things like this? https://stripe.com/alipay

Easy. Because they focus on developers. "Hacker News promotion" (a community of developers) is a side effect of that, not the other way around.

But.. Payments is more than about developers. It's the finance people that reconcile, the budget that pays for it's transaction fees, the customer support when a transaction goes wrong. My point is ease-of-integration is just one part and for large companies, an insignificant part. Sometimes this feels lost and it's all "wahey, JSON API".

You've never integrated an old-school payments API have you? Integration is not insignificant. Having spent developer/weeks wrangling XML (I'm looking at you authorize.net), being able to do the same in an afternoon is life changing.

Now, I'm a loyal customer and recommend them to everyone. Sure, they cost more, but it's worth it.

Yeap, done a ton of them. Alot get it right, some wrong. Many of them have caught up. The biggest problems you can run into are usually support orientated which I rarely see anything about here.

I completely agree that support matters. What I like about both Stripe and Braintree is that both have great documentation that make integration super-simple. (I liked their docs so much that I blogged about them: http://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2015/07/24/good-documentatio...)

I have integrated with CyberSource and PayPal. CyberSource took a week. PayPal took a couple days. Braintree and Stripe? A few hours!

Besides this, their reporting (via API) is simple to use and integrate with our analytics pipeline. By contrast my analytics team spent days on the phone with both CyberSource and PayPal.

Finally, the rates aren't that bad. If you have significant transaction volume, you can negotiate a rate comparable to the "legacy" payment processors. Both the sales and support teams have been quite helpful.

That's absolutely true and I think support is an area that they are going to invest in soon. I had a client that wanted to process $250k/year with them, but didn't sign up because they couldn't get someone on the phone. Not even sales, let alone support!

...and thats when it becomes a normal payment provider. I worked for one that invested far more in its call centers than its APIs. It actually worked very well for them!

i had horrible experiences with an "industry standard and cheaper provider"

i once spend several hours in a cusomer care help center of my payment provider to figure out why and how they broke our checkout. this was in the middle of the night obviously because of timezones and the people on the other end where non-technical.

not saying this couldnt happen w/ stripe or that my payment provider was the best alternative (it was before stripe existed and was a european provider) but still…

i agree w/ you that payment providers are more than JSON API but from my perception stripe does a good job in those areas as well

When you are a working on a side project 10-15 hours a week and need to integrate payments, being able to integrate stripe in a few hours is a game changer. Imagine having only 10-15 hours a week to work on something but spending 40 hours just on payments.

I agree with that. I recommend them for quick projects myself. Big companies however....

Big companies can negotiate fees.

because it's a commodity business

the saved costs in developer time are in early stage a strong argument

in case of doubt i would act them same

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