We found Stripe to be the easiest and most affordable to implement. $.30 + 2.9% processing fee per transaction, though.
Micropayments are tough (if that's what you're going for).
Micropayments are tough (if that's what you're going for).
When Stripe was just barely starting out in YC (i.e. just announced but before demo day), I noticed a few minor typos in their docs. I got on the Stripe IRC channel, and asked where they wanted the diff sent, and Patrick Collison (founder) told me to just mail it to support@ since he'd be getting it anyhow. Patch sent, good deed done, and I'm all finished... or so I thought.
Afterwards, they sent me a Stripe t-shirt just to say thanks. Stripe is more than just developer-centric and easy to use, the people running the show are a class act.
With paypal and Braintree, I was able to easily get someone on the phone. Even though Braintree has been acquired by Paypal, Paypal had the best service, Braintree had issues with their phone system and the sales people were not as knowledgeable or helpful - this I did not expect from Paypal.
The person from Stripe explained that he could not talk to me on the phone (only e-mail) because they are growing so fast. Growing fast is a great thing for the people who own and invested in Stripe, but it is bad for me as the customer because it means I will get a more inferior experience while they catch up with their growth. (Even once their growth is complete, its hard to say what kind of company it will have turned into) If I'm going to run over 100k a year in sales through a company, I think it is very reasonable to expect to get someone on the phone. Also, this is a very important thing for our company. Its risky and unwise to do this much business with a company that I cannot get on the phone.
The next issue I had with Stripe is that they didn't have much interest in working with my small company. My first hint of this was their contact form. The lowest tier I could select on our monthly credit card revenue was "<75k a month". So I wasn't surprised when the rep explained to me that I couldn't get a rate below 2.9% until we did 80k a month in sales. We are a small company that does about 9k a month credit card sales. Paypal was willing to give us 2.5% because we did more than 3k a month, and if we went up to 10k a month, they would automatically reduce our rate again. Braintree quoted 2.4% based on our sales volume.
If using Stripe's super-friendly APIs (and management portal) isn't worth $36/month to you compared to PayPal's APIs, that's certainly your choice.
The "widest" gap will be if you grow to doing just under Stripe's $80K/month cutoff for their first tier of rate discounts, paying them 2.9% while you'd be at 2.2% with PayPal. Here the difference is at most 0.007 * 80000 = $560/month. At that point, how much developer time is it worth investing for you to "recover" 0.7% of revenue? Or is there some better use of that valuable time to grow your business by 0.7% -- at which time you have access to more favorable rates from Stripe?
(Disclaimer: happily abandoned PayPal's API several years ago, using Stripe happily since then! Maybe PayPal has improved, I don't know.)
The problem is that they communicated to me that my business is not worth very much to them. This is a precarious situation for my company to be in because our merchant processor is a key part of our business.
My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me that as a general rule, its not a good idea to work with companies that don't care about you as a customer or for which you are not a target customer. The reason this is not a good idea is because it significantly increases the risk that I will run into unanticipated problems that they will be unlikely to fix.
Stripe basically told me that I am not their target customer and that they don't care about me unless my business is 10x the size it is now. Based on their contact form, I was a little surprised that they were willing to take me as a customer at all.
Perhaps a good analogy is the big bank vs credit union situation. If I was a very large business, I would have a good experience working with a large, national bank. But (I think) statistically speaking, individual consumers are more likely to be happy with smaller credit unions where they are worth more as a customer.
Stripe used to be attractive, particularly for smaller and/or newer businesses, because of the rapid set-up and hands-off approach, the developer-friendly API, their famously well-presented and well-maintained documentation, immediate responses by in-the-loop staff to support questions, and generally a "we get it" kind of attitude that felt like working with a peer who understands your concerns.
Sadly, in recent times those seem to have given way to an ever-changing and sometimes breaking API, quite often incorrect or incomplete documentation, almost copy-and-paste half-responses sometimes arriving days after the original mail (or not), and generally an "if you're going through these channels, you probably aren't that important" kind of vibe.
The thing is, without those developer-friendly, real-person characteristics, what is left for a small business is mostly just another payments service with higher than average fees, a crazy high failed transaction rate in our experience (YMMV), and below par anti-fraud and security options. (Edit: They also seem to have had a lot of minor outages around their API recently, which don't always seem to be reflected in their pretty mostly-green status display.) There is a lot more competition in the payments space than there was even just a few years ago, both for processing services and for the payment methods themselves, and others do some or all of these things better today.
It seems clear at this point that Stripe have become victims of their own well-deserved success, and it looks like their focus has shifted to larger and presumably more lucrative businesses rather than the start-ups and side businesses where they established their reputation in the early days. That's an entirely understandable business move on their part, and I'm not going to criticise them for running a business like a business. However, objectively it also means they're no longer attractive for the smaller businesses in the way they once were.
Right now, Stripe is burning off some of their goodwill, but (based on what little I know), I don't really see an alternative for them that doesn't involve just turning away customers. It would be nice (but a total fantasy) to be able to measure how much the lost goodwill is actually costing over the long term vs. profit from the increase in company size now.
On the other hand, I also don't recommend them by default to people in my network with new startups or small businesses any more. I don't expect anyone in that sort of position who does sign up with them today to enjoy the same advantages that some of us did a few years ago.
Maybe Stripe have a clear idea of how this is going to work out for them in the long run. Objectively, I'm sure that if they lost every business that I personally work on today that still uses them, they wouldn't even notice. They could probably also lose every business that went with them in part because of my recommendation and not even notice, since as far as I know none of those businesses has yet exploded to unicorn-like proportions. Presumably the risk is that if they alienate the startup community as a whole then sooner or later they will start missing out on attracting startups that will go on to be very successful, and that would make a significant difference. However, if they're now doing well with more traditional and already-established businesses anyway, maybe it's still commercially in their best interests to go that way.
I think losing reputation and volume with the start-up community is probably very costly. An interesting thought is they might not have a viable alternative? If their cup is already too full, they have to cut back somewhere. Providing good service, at scale, while also growing rapidly is debateably impossible.
Obviously there are several other card payment services these days that might not be quite a easy to integrate as Stripe but might have compensating advantages in other respects.
However, there are other payment methods that might wind up being better bets anyway as they are increasingly available to smaller businesses through other new services. An obvious example here in the UK is GoCardless for Direct Debits, which easily beats Stripe on most of the important metrics but has the huge disadvantage of only being available to customers with a local bank account. However, SEPA is already starting to change what "local" means in that context, and if they start partnering up with other alternative payment schemes internationally, I could see them becoming a very good option for a lot of smaller businesses if they can avoid the same fate as Stripe.
The elephant in the room for me is whether there is now an opportunity for someone to out-Stripe Stripe. After all, they established the viability of the market for processing payments for small businesses, and they now seem willing to surrender that market as they move on to bigger things. That leaves quite an attractive gap for a new entrant to become the default payment service for startups for a while (probably before either following a similar growth path or being acquired by one of the incumbents, so you have multiple potential big exits as well).