EBay to Ditch PayPal for Dutch Payment Processor Adyen | Hacker News Reader

EBay to Ditch PayPal for Dutch Payment Processor Adyen

bloomberg.com

360 pointswatchdogtimer191 comments

Here's what puzzles me. I have looked into Stripe, and just browsed the Adyen webpage. Both of those services seem to require you to maintain your own "active" server that can run server side code.

PayPal seems to be unique in being able to take payments from a passive web page, because the customer conducts their transaction at PP's website.

This is why I continue to use PP for my tiny little business (without eBay). Even though I consider myself reasonably tech savvy, I don't trust myself to maintain a website that is compatible with everybody's browser, phone, etc., and that guarantees the security of their personal data. Moving to another payment processor requires a quantum leap in technology that I'd rather not keep up with. I'd rather design another gizmo.

From time to time I look around for an alternative to PP, and haven't found one yet. I suspect that many small-time eBay sellers may be in the same boat.

Best way to integrate with stripe is to use their checkout button to get a token instead of receiving CC info directly.

Iirc, still need to use backend code to do the actual charge, but at least you never see any sensitive info.

Right, but the poster is saying they don't want to run a server AT ALL.

Then what are they running their website on? This is a perfect example of the infectious nature of the word cloud, people say the word cloud as if there's no server still running it!

Oh noes, I have to run php code stripe has done all the work on and provided to me! Scary!

Couldn't you run a more static based site if you don't have to run some PHP code though?

I was just using php as an example. See stripes documentation for more info:

https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js

https://stripe.com/docs/charges

There's a big difference between running a server that does basically glorified inventory tracking, and running a server that hosts (even just a wrapper around) payment infrastructure.

If my inventory service breaks I might have some pissed-off customers or have to re-ship some items, the odds of getting in bigger trouble than that are low. If my payment infrastructure goes down or gets compromised, the odds of lawsuits or federal/financial-org penalties are way higher.

So sure, you still probably have to have a "server" somewhere (you could probably make a fully static site for a merchant using third-party payment links, javascript, and mailto links or something--think "email as database"--but I suspect this would be neither featureful, secure, nor reliable), but the difference in what you need to maintain/serve is huge.

Working with Stripe and PayPal are essentially the same if you use best practices. Stripe can do the payment page and redirect if needed and can also capture paying info from a static page that is submitted via JS in the background. In the end you'd get a simple token that's just a reference to the payment details in Stripe (just like PP). If you integrate with the Stripe payment page then they will even remember you across sites (again, just like PP) and you won't have to input payment details.

If you use Stripe, you still need a server to make secure API calls to charge the card. The card is not charged until you make an API call with the token.

How's visa checkout? War under the impression that it was a direct PayPal competitor.

I'll take a look. Thanks. If nothing else, offering two payment options would be good for the very small fraction of customers who have had a bad experience with PP for whatever reason.

I can't speak for how it is now. However: the implementation for developers was so bad that they offered my company $200k to integrate it into our site and we STILL lost money on the deal.

No, Visa Checkout is a confusingly named product that only serves to send credit card data to a merchant’s servers. The card data isn’t even kept safe by a intermediate token; the merchant has to run a PCI compliant solution.

That’s very different from PayPal’s offering.

Not sure I follow - you mentioned not handling browser compatibility which implies you're not directly writing the html/css for the site. If you're using shopify or hosted wordpress or something, I would think most of those providers would handle the Stripe integration for you?

You also mention a passive web page, if you're talking about a static site (as in a jekyll or hugo site hosted on S3), you may be right. I don't fully understand how that might work since if you're accepting payment for a service, presumably you also need to keep state somewhere to track the delivery of that service to users and such. But if you did want to accept Stripe on a static site, I would think you could use Lambda functions in AWS to handle the callbacks without worrying about the maintenance costs and security risks of running your own linux server.

You don’t need any of that. For a small shop an email from the payment processor with the customer’s name, address, and order details is all you need.

No lambda, backend, or database necessary.

I'm using Google Sites. Previously, I wrote plain HTML, but just the most basic sort, that most browsers will typically format into something readable, even if not beautiful.

You're right, I mean a static site -- one that cannot run a server side script.

At its most basic level, you can pay me by going to PayPal and telling them to send money to my account. PP takes your credit card info. I get an e-mail, and my PP account shows a log of transactions. Then I click on "create shipping label," and it creates a shipping label (USPS or UPS) to the customer's address.

At a slightly higher level, PP will generate a "add to cart" button in the form of HTML that you paste into your web page. But it does the same thing as sending money to my account -- it just looks a bit more professional and maybe less confusing.

This is for a gadget, but for enthusiasts in an area where people are not typically tech savvy, and don't feel put off by a site that doesn't look professionally maintained.

Edit: I should note that despite seeming sketchy, a lot of trust is built into PP's buyer and seller protection policies. If I try to screw around with you in any way, PayPal will happily reverse the transaction.

> If I try to screw around with you in any way, PayPal will happily reverse the transaction.

And they will also happily reverse the transaction if you don't.

IMO it should be like this, in favour of the buyer.

What do you sell? Or maybe put in profile?

I think the idea is that eBay doesn't want to have users sign up with Paypal anymore. Instead only ever interact with eBay, with Adyen just being the pipes for eBay.

The idea is that they want their god-given chunk of that sweet transaction margin, not hand some proportion of it over to PayPal.

Ha! Nothing like improving the bottom line.

Then they should have kept PayPal as a subsidiary.

Wouldn't small time eBay sellers just use whatever payment processor eBay integrates with? (there's no need for them to host any part of the payment process since the transaction is conducted entirely on eBay). Reasons to not use the default processor would be : transaction cost.

The reason for processing on your own server is so you own the entire checkout experience. If you redirect he user to another site for payment, you run the risk of losing track of that user. Also, the third-party’s branding may clash with your own.

The third party branding can also be positive depending on your own brand trust.

Made numerous payments to shoddy businesses in SE asia the last month, but since most offer PayPal as payment provider I feel confident entering my CC number.

Going to a well known third party is a guarantee that my payment data isn't sitting in a poorly secured vendor database. That's more important to me than a seamless transaction. PayPal is most useful when you don't fully trust the site you are buying from to have their shit together.

Ebay presumably doesn't have this problem though... they are large enough to be trusted on their own...

It just takes one malicious ad on the payment page... and the tempation to shove ads into the face of every customer and his dog is big.

Think about java updates and a certain antivirus product as a great example of insane greed :)

eBay itself had a major password hack in 2014.

This. Entirely.

I used to work for a small ecommerce webdev shop. I’ve worked on sooo many shitty insecure shopping carts over the years I simply know not to trust basically any small website asking for my card. Completely unencrypted, storing CVVs, sending CC details as GET parameters, I’ve seen it all. It’s painfully common!

If a company is not a huge name, and is handling your credit card info themselves, they are mishandling your credit card information in one way or another. I guarantee it.

Having been through PCI compliance, it’s no joke. It’s really not worth doing yourself in my strong opinion.

> If a company is not a huge name

Not to be snarky, but a huge name is no guarantee of safety. See: Target, Equifax.

Even eBay itself (PayPal's parent) had a major password hack in 2014.

However, the advantage of PayPal is that I can buy from multiple websites while only needing to trust one entity with my credit card information.

If trusting one entity can already be insecure, having to trust dozens of them is nuts.

Parent didn’t say that. You assumed the converse.

This. I wish there was a fundamentally different way of handling payments. Something like a one time hash you give the vendor that serves like a digital check(cheque). This way, if they lose the hash they lost their money instead of the customer's.

Handing a merchant credit card details "feels" like handing them a blank Check and trusting them to not take more than they should because of the risk of them losing the data.

Edit: The digital hash should say where money comes from, to who, for what purpose, time, auth code and so on.

I live in Denmark, and they have a system of phone banking here called "Mobile Pay" it works kind of like that. Where you transfer money to the merchant public phone number and show them proof of sending.. However it only works for in-person payments where you can swing your phone to show.

There are also banks that provide virtual credit cards that can only be used by one merchant and where you specify the max amount and expiration date.

Yeah, but that's like buying a gift card for every merchant. That's a huge inconvenience. I can't buy one for every small website I want to buy stuff from..

It's 2018 we should be generating these on the fly from my encrypted 2FA phone app instantly.

This is a reality in many places already. On the internet I never input any real card details, I go to the app, generate a virtual card with X amount available or for one buy only or for a single merchant for Y amount of time and use the generated card details instead.

You do, if you use Apple Pay or Google Pay.

There's ApplePay, which provides a very nice experience (if your customer is using Safari :( )

> I wish there was a fundamentally different way of handling payments

Seconded. At the risk of simply rephrasing everything you just said:

It's a pity the banks and credit card companies just refuse to innovate.

When I buy something from an online vendor, they should never get my full card details. PayPal ameliorates things (you can generally trust PayPal), but really there should be no need for PayPal. The banks/credit-card companies should provide a convenient way to authorise the payment, in a way that doesn't trust the vendor.

Here in the UK, we already have chip-and-pin, and card readers (the kind that show unique numbers - they're used for online banking), but we're still stuck with the trust-the-vendor-or-use-PayPal model for online payments.

Using card-readers for online payments would also help with credit-card theft.

> (you can generally trust PayPal)

I agree, but I also have a counterexample:

"Oh, you bought SOFTWARE?? All those pretty marketing pages about our amazing safety and protection system do not apply to virtual products. We agree this vendor totally screwed you over, but it's not our problem."

(this was a few years ago, may have changed)

edit: It eroded my trust in the company completely. I don't really have an opinion of their technology.

PayPal have certainly had a few screw-ups. My personal favourite: when they locked $750,000 of MineCraft sales money. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103385-PayPal-Free...

At a glance it seems software products are now covered - https://www.paypal.com/il/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full?...

Card-readers are “trust your bank with information security” black boxes.

If their online banking password policies are anything to go by — Halifax and especially Nationwide — then very definitely no thankyou.

Nationwide asks you to set three pieces of memorable information. You can then log in with any 1 of those 3, at your option. https://onlinebanking.nationwide.co.uk/AccessManagement/Logi...

This seems obviously stupid to me, but I'll accept that Nationwide knows better than me if HN says so.

> Card-readers are “trust your bank with information security” black boxes.

Well of course I trust my bank. No escaping that. The point is not to have to trust the vendor.

> online banking

I wasn't suggesting a payment system based on signing-in to online banking.

Your complaints about online banking security may be valid, but aren't the same issue.

Many online payment processors have integrations that don't require card information to reach the merchant's server. For example, if you use Stripe[0], the merchant only receives a token that can be used for API calls. If you use Apple Pay or Google Pay, regardless of payment processor, the merchant receives a transaction-specific credit card.

[0] https://stripe.com/us/payments

There is payment systems being standardised in browsers at the moment.

https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

Google Pay follows this standard. Apple Pay has a similar, but Safari-specific, API.

Isn't 3DSecure like this? If properly implemented (a giant if, there), the query to the payment provider would happen using client-side Javascript, so your credit card data doesn't touch the shop's server. Then a 3DSecure window from your bank pops up so you can confirm the payment.

The alternative, telling the user to manually go to their bank and generate a token for amount X, would lead to so many people not bothering, and to so many lost sales. Or copy-paste errors, because users are dumb.

The problem with 3dsecure is that it's still driven by the merchant. If you see it, you can be pretty sure they're doing something right, but if you don't see it then you've just given them your payment details and have no recourse.

Many just don't turn it on because it's another step and they don't have issues with fraud, as well.

I could be wrong but I think this is how Apple Pay is supposed to work. (Though a non-proprietary version of this would be fantastic, but this is a baby step I suppose.)

That is mostly how Apple Pay works. The one-time hash happens to be a transaction-specific credit card.

You can do all of that with Adyen, however if you run a shop which people only buy from once in a while, e.g. garden sheds, then you would not have value in the token, therefore this is not a common feature.

Adyen works with your shop no matter how PCI compliant and well-built, so you can have it in the checkout or the separate payment page. Interestingly you can also pay by paypal via Adyen.

I have found the online login bit for merchants to be as flaky and naff on Adyen as other payment gateways of yesteryear - forever timing you out and not letting you in, just really bad UX as banks seem to prefer.

I don't see these blockchain based payment systems as fundamentally solving anything in online payments needed for ecommerce, the Adyen tool kit is pretty large and bits such as the 'token' are not needed in real life, or some of the stranger mobile payment solutions that also promise to change the world as much as the crypto-coin 'promises'.

not sure if this is an obtuse cryptocurrency joke, or you didn't realize you were describing cryptocurrency...

And why would that matter to me? I've shopped online at small (and large) vendors for 20 years and I've never experienced fraud. Even if I did, the CC company covers it, don't they?

But these problems don't exist if you use a service like Stripe. You never ever store any confidential customer information on your own servers.

Stripe was just getting big as I left for a job in edtech so I never had a chance to work with it. Excuse my ignorance but does it require you to send your card info to the vendors server rather than directly to stripe? If that’s the case you are still wide open to basically every form of bad handling.

Just because a vendor doesn’t NEED to store your CC doesn’t mean they’re not out of sheer ignorance or incompetence.

Nope, it's designed so that the card details never touch the vendors server. They don't see it to be able to store it.

You and I and the rest of the HN crowd are concerned about this problem, but the rest of the world doesn't even know that it exists. I wonder what real world bounce rates look like for PayPal vs InsecureCart.

That's not how Stipe and similar services work. They exist to prevent your scenario. They actually work very similar to Paypal except that you don't have to be redirected to the Paypal site to enter your credentials. Instead you get a small "secured by Stripe" widget that takes the credentials (directly to Stripes PCI compliant servers so that yours don't have to be).

As a reply you'll get some kind of token that you can use to actually charge the credit card (or SEPA, or whatever else).

It's a secure way of handling payment without the "we're now redirecting you to some payment site" which BY THE WAY Paypal themselves offer in the form of their Braintree payment services.

I see a possible problem with that statement: starting from a poorly secured sellers site, users can't really be sure if he ends up on the real PayPal page anyway.

I like the ease of use of pay pal, but the redirect is a pain point for sure. Occasionally I'm not sure if I've actually purchased something.

From a user perspective, I wouldn't trust a site that uses it's own payment processor, unless you are Amazon, Ebay etc. Double that if you ask for credit card details. Redirecting to a well-known payment processor (PayPal etc.) guarantees that I can pay safely.

> From a user perspective, I wouldn't trust a site that uses it's own payment processor, unless you are Amazon, Ebay etc.

"etc."? That leaves a lot of companies where you potentially do business. Note that the size of the company isn't necessarily an indicator that the company knows how to safely handle payment information.

Since when does checkout needs to be an "experience"?

I'd much rather trust Paypal than a company worried about losing track of me or that I might see a different branding.

That different branding is the very reason I'm doing the transaction in the first place: I trust Paypal way more than any company's self-hosted checkout.

Checkout has been an experience for decades. The candy/magazines by the checkout line in your grocery store are now ads on the cart page. Amazon even promotes using a specific credit card in some cases: Use Discover to save 5%, or Save 10% when you get an Amazon Visa.

It also puts you squarely in PCI scope which is a massive burden. I believe many of the modern payment processors offer embedded iframe solutions these days where they handle the sensitive bits (card and CVV#) but allow you to style the payment form however you like.

to an extent yes. There is another lever, PA-DSS compliance which is less stringent than full PCI-DSS compliance because you aren't actually storing card data on your servers, they are just passing through, or pages that collect them are being rendered by that server.

Does Stripe Checkout not fit the bill?

https://stripe.com/checkout

Stripe Checkout still requires server side code for the Stripe checkout form to submit to.

You might want to take a look at https://www.everbutton.com/. It basically wraps Stripe’s API so you can drop front end JavaScript without any backend code. Much more customizable than PayPal with all of Stripe’s benefits.

i agree it's actually kind of bad that payment providers don't provide this page. todays technology could even render it on the webpage of the customer shop without redirecting fully to another page (scrpt scr=paymentproviderscript.bla? or so?). If people have to maintain and host their own script it makes them horrible prone to attack. In which case i'd rather have a payment provider who needs to secure it than every customer of the payment provider (reduces attack surface). i think paypal does good by providing this passive system and other providers should follow it, and perhaps if it's not to their liking innovate in this line instead of dumping their issues to the customer shop.

> scrpt scr=paymentproviderscript.bla?

They can't do this because then the untrusted merchant has access to everything again. It needs to be sandboxed in a separate page so that the customer is talking directly with the processor, with SOP, cors, https, and simply not being able to intercept PII and payment information.

This is already possible via iframes, check out braintree payments for example.

Most third-party payment gateways I've worked with are like this.

They usually offer some kind of "pay links" or something similar.

Adyen actually provides this too, it's called Hosted Payment Pages (HPP)[1] and it's difficult to find because the documentation structure is abysmal.

There's a shared secret you can use to verify the payment when they callback to you after payment, and their HPP is skinnable.

[1] https://docs.adyen.com/developers/api-reference/hosted-payme...

Stripe checkout does this

Potentially a great move for eBay to reign in processing fees and to consolidate the dispute resolution process within their own platform. A large pain point for many eBay users has been Paypal's opaque dispute process. (I admit to bias: I lost ~$5,000 in Paypal balance while in college due to Paypal siding with a dishonest international buyer)

For those of you contemplating Adyen vs. Stripe: Adyen is much more "bare metal." Think more like a modern Authorize.net. Nobody comes close to Stripe's turnkey developer-friendliness.

(I work at Stripe.)

Glad to hear on the developer friendliness! If there are ways we can continue to improve on that front, please shoot me a note: lachy@stripe.com

I'm curious though what you mean when you say Adyen is much more "bare metal" than Stripe. We don't typically talk too much publicly about our underlying infrastructure (our goal is to abstract away that [hopefully] unnecessary complexity), but we do strive to be as close to the bare metal as possible. (We're directly connected to all of the major card brands, and have "acquiring licenses" in numerous markets.)

I interpreted that as a positive nod towards Stripe. In other words, Adyen and Stripe provide equivalent functionality but Adyen requires more work to adopt.

I wasn't exactly sure which direction to read it :-) We often get questions around our underlying infrastructure and how we process payments (this is what I work on at Stripe!), so that bias is probably affecting my read...

Meant as a positive nod: Stripe is to Heroku as Adyen is to renting a dedicated server. With Stripe I don't have to worry about implementing a billion APIs or being PCI compliant unless I want to.

Basically, great work.

But for larger companies ready for deeper optimizations, especially on the pricing side, "bare metal" merchant services will always have their allure.

The failed payment alert functionality is a touch lacking for some SAAS scenarios.

The link in the alert email cannot be “parameterized”... it will only go to "the_saas_company.com". But I need the link to go to a per customer url, eg. "customercode.the_saas_company.com/billing". Heck basically anything that would allow my server to redirect the request to the "right" billing page (eg. the_saas_company.com/failedpayment/stripecustomernumber).

Stripe is one of the most intuitive developer facing products that we get to use! We've almost never experienced any sort of issue. To celebrate Stripe this week we made an animated gif about the developer experience of Stripe versus PayPal if you want a laugh: https://imgur.com/VpsnbZF

I say this as a loyal and very happy Stripe user: I'm not sure you can describe a bunch of JavaScript widgets as bare metal.

You don’t have to use all the JS widgets; you can integrate with forms more directly if you want.

as a buyer I never worry about purchases I make on ebay. I use paypal to send the money but other than that paypal is not in the picture. if I have a dispute with a seller ebay refunds me if I prove my case.

I was just recently refunded over five hundred dollars for a purchase made on ebay because the seller never had the item to sell. Now I had to wait until the last day of delivery passed and wait the "resolve with seller first" delay which is only three days I think. In the end ebay refunded me.

This is not to say ebay is perfect, they don't require sellers to provide tracking through ebay and they should. they should require it within three business days or allow a refund. In my case the fraudulent seller never provided tracking information even though I made three requests

PayPal is the whole reason I stopped selling on eBay 15 or so years ago.

I use PayPal as a buyer, I would NEVER use them as a seller.

One of the bigger drawbacks of Adyen vs Stripe, although we wanted to work with them a lot, is, they require a crazy reserve (in the millions) if your model is subscription based. The logic behind it from them is, that they must be able to refund all your customers in case you go bankrupt, and you have subscribers left hanging without full-filled service they paid in advance for.

Although I get the logic behind it, not one other PSP requires such a huge reserve, therefore we decided not to work with them.

Todays payments world is v competitive and players like checkout.com and many others are v aggresive trying to disrupt stripe's dominance in this area

Wouldn’t they simply require a reserve that is proportional to the amount you’re charging for the recurring payment?

Usually most PSP's do have some reserve rule, like keeping the 5% up to an X amount of sum, but with Adyen their team calculated the X amount to be in the millions - not one PSP (and we worked with all of them) had this.

So it was still percentage based? I’m a bit confused from your phrasing. Sounds like the problem was that 5% of X could end up being millions, because it had a high ceiling? That doesn’t sound so bad.

Also, when talking to them they were stuck on requiring photos of a passport as a requirement for the recipient of the payment if I remember right. In the U.S. That's a non-starter as many people don't have passports and even if they did wouldn't be used to providing them in a business setting, so we ultimately passed.

I used Adyen and they never needed that.

Are you saying that to process recurring fees on Stripe (as so many startups do) that you need this reserve?

Definitely not, from experience. I think the opening poster means that Adyen needs such a large reserve, since I definitely know subscriptions-based startups that don't have any reserve with Stripe

phew :)

yes, I meant adyen, not stripe, sorry for confusion

Adyen is crazy with the reserves. It's the sole reason we went with Stripe over Adyen.

I've never heard of Adyen here in Australia before this. I assume they are far more Europe/US oriented? I assume they will be rolling out the new integration world wide, so that it will become more ubiquitous? I believe Paypal has a local office in Aus, so I presume Adyen will be setting up local offices in most countries?

(I also noticed on the video that it is pronounced "Adi-an" where I first thought "Ad-yen" which makes them sound more like an ad wholesaler than a payment processor.)

I doubt Adyen is well known among North Americans either (the first market being rolled out for ebay). Ayden is used by Uber and Netflix and some other big names but that's mostly hidden in the background as they are integrated directly into the platforms. Unlike Paypal which has an obvious branded layer for all transactional layers.

I'm curious what the integration with Ebay will look like. Will users be redirected to their Ayden accounts ala Paypal or will it be branded via Ebay?

I think the term eBay is using is intermediated payments. I think as a buyer, you would pay to eBay and eBay would pay to seller. So should be frictionless.

Since Uber and Netflix are using Ayden in the background I am guessing they can handle global payments. Most of us never knew what payment provider did these companies use so far.

Never heard of Adyen here in Europe either… But from their website it seems they handle payments for some pretty well-known companies: https://www.adyen.com/customers

My previous employer in SEAsia is using Adyen, with majority customer in Europe and Aus/NZ. Hundred thousands of customer. I've never heard of Adyen before joining this company, but my experience with them has been positive. Not Stripe good, but at least on par with other modern payment processor.

Major upside for Adyen is they price match(at least for my company, we process USD ~350mil/annum). This may sounds crazy but my company constantly negotiate the pricing with them. Almost on monthly basis.

I knew this because my team have to work with lots of local and China-based payment processor to create PoC. Just so that corporate team can show this to Adyen and renegotiate the fee.

When I used Braintree a few years ago, before it was acquired by PayPal and before Stripe launched in the UK, Adyen handled Braintree's merchant accounts (in Europe, at least). I'd never heard of them before (or since). I remember the signup/KYC process as being a massive pain, as we needed to do KYC with Adyen as well as Braintree. It took weeks. A few years later when Stripe launched in the UK I was totally blown away by how simple and quick it was to sign up.

I have heard of it as it's a Dutch company and I am Dutch. They are doing really well in the sense of having many payment methods, as in Europe every country prefers a different method. The CEO has a lot of experience in payment integrations and financial transactions, even before starting Adyen. Furthermore, in the Netherlands they are also rolling out payment machines that are cheap and support many payment options (also think about Apple Pay etc).

Cool. As a native Dutch, perhaps you can shed some light. I saw on the video that the pronunciation of the name is more like "Ardee-yun". Is that correct? Also, is it a Dutch word? If so, I'm interested in learning what it means (if anything).

Adyen doesn't mean anything in Dutch. We, or atleast I as a native Dutch person, pronounce it AD (as in Latin ad) - YEN (as in the Japanese currency).

From their about page, it's 'Surinamese for “Start over again”'. It seems to be pronounced as "Ah-dee-yen".

Thank you for that explanation!

To me it sounded very much like Limburgs dialect (specifically Kerkraads dialect) "adieë wa" (only first part, but sometimes the second part is omitted anyway) [1]

English Wikipedia also has an entry for the company Adyen, btw [2].

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groet_(etiquette)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyen

I hadn't heard of them until I moved to the Netherlands and only became aware of them because buying e.g. cinema tickets flashed up on my phone as a payment to Adyen rather than Pathe.

We use Adyen at Kogan. They definitely have some staff here and some in Singapore I believe.

I only live a couple of km away from Ayden and this is the first time I've heard of this company.

(I work at Adyen) - Adyen has an office and acquiring license in Australia, offers EFTPOS, and works with Kogan, Showpo, Freelancer.com, and others.

If anyone else, like me, thought eBay owned PayPal:

> On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. On September 30, 2014, eBay Inc. announced the divestiture of PayPal as an independent company, which was completed on July 20, 2015.

Yes. The Masters of the Universe decided that there was "value to be unlocked" by spinning off PayPal. Or at least...someone's spreadsheet said there was value to be unlocked..

Carl Icahn to be exact

And there actually was... PayPal itself is still (after this news) worth more than both eBay and PayPal were as a single company. Add both together and it was an obvious win.

Strange that since eBay probably owns a lot of PayPal stock that they would try to tank Paypal. Maybe eBay sold their Paypal stock holdings ahead of this change.

Wouldn't that be insider trading?

eBay has no stake in PayPal, that was the whole purpose of splitting it out. Shareholders of eBay before the split were given PYPL shares on a 1:1 basis.

I think to win that game you have to wait a few years and then compare the aggregate value vs the pre-split value adjusted for average sector gain over the period.

I remembered that eBay spun off PayPal, but I thought PayPal still owned x.com. But after checking, it looks like Elon Musk held onto that domain before selling his steak in PayPal.

Elon bought x.com back from PayPal in July 2017.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/884580654117076992

Paypal steak does not sound like it would taste good

Luckily, there's a cryptocurrency for that: https://steaktoken.com/

I'm all for a competitor in this space. PayPal is very cocky and stagnant.

Heh, I felt PayPal has been playing catch up for years now.

Cocky maybe, certainly not stagnant.

>certainly not stagnant

Hmm. Maybe I'm misinformed? What kind of innovative things have they done recently? As a PayPal merchant, the UI is still a clunky mix of old and new, and weird session errors and logging in twice, etc. We just barely got past SHA1 certs.

And very pushy about having me open an account with them just because i want to buy something.

It has reached the point that i think twice about doing business if the store only offer Paypal.

(Autoplay video)

I wonder when eBay will change their rules that currently state that you must offer Paypal and cannot mention other payment options (including cash) in a listing.

It is not that way in oz, it was ruled illegal.

I quit eBay (and failed to get back to a comparable experience, unfortunately) the day (years ago) that they stopped allowing people to sell and specify payment options that didn't have the extra Paypal fee. Forcing everyone to use Paypal and pay the fee was obviously corrupt.

Does anyone here use Adyen? We use Stripe but are starting to consider options that may increase conversions.

Adyen will be better if you have more consumer cards vs. business cards being charged. Nearly 100% chance of this, otherwise Stripe may win.

Is there middleware that can route transactions based on criteria to various payment processors?

There definitely is not. Good idea though, however the margins would be razor thin. Possibly too thin.

Seems like it would be best in this case to offer a fixed rate?

Google "payment routing". There definitely is middleware you can buy to route payments to different processors. I've built my own for my business on top of Spreedly. I'm not sure what you think the issue would be with margins; the routing service doesn't have any direct costs other than servers.

My company, Invoiced, supports routing payments across different processors/merchant accounts. There are many interesting use cases for it within the billing space beyond just cutting transaction costs.

One common use case we see is trust accounting for lawyers. The gist of it is that trust and operating funds are stored in separate bank accounts, depending on the context of the bill. It’s a legal requirement that can result in disbarment if not followed properly.

Another scenario we run into is with insurance billing where policy payments need to go to different bank accounts or even be handled by a different processor, depending on the policy.

I know of other software systems that can do payment routing as well.

I work at Spreedly and this is essentially what we do. Store credit cards with us (we're PCI Level 1 Compliant) then decide which payment processor you want to send cards to for transactions. We don't provide automatic routing so you'd need to decide which processor to use on your end but you could easily charge the same card against two different payment gateways if you wanted to.

Did you guys recently just change your pricing structure? I remember it was per card a while ago and thought it was too expensive. But not it doesn’t look that bad!

Yes we changed it a few days ago.

Can you explain why this is?

They built an incredible amount of infrastructure to support it, better than anyone due to the fact they were all ex payment execs. Business cards are nuanced and they didn't focus on it, though they're about 1:1 with Stripe.

Adyen is an "interchange-plus" payment processor, which means they pass on the interchange fee charged to them by the payment processing networks, plus a fixed markup.

Stripe is a flat-rate payment processor: 2.9% + $0.30 on everything.

Interchange fees range from 0.05% to 3.2%, more or less. Most consumer cards are going to be significantly cheaper than 2.9% to process. Many people use "check cards" from their bank which are in that 0.05% category, for example. American Express and the top tier Visa and MasterCard rewards/business cards are the ones where interchange can exceed 2.9%.

There are many "interchange-plus" merchant account providers now. I get better rates than Adyen is advertising on their website right now.

Stripe supports interchange plus when a business would prefer that solution. For the majority of businesses that we work with, they prefer the simplicity of the rates published on our site.

What are the added complexities involved with your interchange plus model? I'm curious as to why companies would prefer to pay more; what am I missing?

Why would they be paying more? As GP states, the fees can be quite a bit lower, but they vary by card type.

Note that EU customers of Stripe get a drastically nicer 1.4% + 20p charge.

It's not about a better deal from Stripe, it's Europeans have to pay less in general.

Yeah sure. Remind me when I buy my next iPhone for a ~45% markup compared to the US prices. The 64GB 4.7" iPhone 8 is $699.00 in the US and $998 (799 EUR) in Germany.

I'm talking about payment processing fees

Note that there is a limit of 0.3% on the interchange fee in the EU for credit cards, and 0.2% for debit cards: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/...

I wonder if it's possible to optimize your payment processing fees by dynamically choosing between flat rate (for premium cards) and interchange plus (for regular cards) payment processors.

Generally, Adyen is cheaper than Stripe but Stripe is easier to integrate. When considering moving from Stripe to Adyen, It comes down to a equation of dev cost/resources to integrate to Adyen compared to the amount of reduced fees/increase auth rates.

The more volume you process, the more a switch makes sense. and this difference of mentality is reflected by the fact Adyen has minimum monthly invoices when Stripe does not.

Longtime Stripe user and did about a year long stint with Adyen. Stripe beats Adyen on ease of integration, ease of using the back office, chargebacks, etc hands down.

Adyen had a better story for omni-channel commerce with card present, but they made us integrate with COM. COM! Apparently they have card present readers coming out that allow you to send some JSON.

In the end after hundreds of hours invested in it, we ditched Adyen. We did have it running in production, BTW. Their pricing was not any cheaper than we got from stripe with interchange plus.

I implemented it for a company I was consulting for. I liked it. Their integration was not as terrible as many here make it seem. What I liked is that it allowed us to offer every payment option under the sun, including "native" options for the European market my customer is operating in (i.e. "iDEAL" for the Netherlands, "Sofort-Überweisung" for Germany, etc).

When Ebay first started requiring Paypal, it made sense - Paypal was clearly the frontrunner for online payments and Ebay's homegrown effort was a pale comparison. Also Ebay was a real powerhouse that could move the needle with a decision like that.

Today I feel like Paypal has a lot more traction than Ebay, and this is going to be a big flop for them. As a consumer I don't want to sign up for yet another payment service.

I think the advantage of Adyen is that you don't need a new account. It supports payment processors that are used all over the world.

This has its own disadvantages. My biggest reason for preferring Paypal to Stripe or other systems is that my Paypal account is linked to my bank account, which means I don't have to recharge my debit card (and pay the charge fee) for each purchase. Account-less systems can't run the proper verification to allow for that

PayPal has working capital programs for small merchants. That’s a huge benefit people overlook. This is also a relatively small part of PayPal’s business and the rest of their business is growing rapidly. I think this will hurt eBay more than anything.

Never heard of Adyen, but it's great to see more Euro companies compete against SV.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16280553

Wonder why they didn’t go with Stripe, but with an European competitor? This is great for the European tech scene.

Adyen is older and it seems to have a larger banking footprint when compared to Stripe. Also, they seem to have a lot of experience in several international markets besides Europe.

Maybe for tax reasons ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich ... just because Ayden is based in Holland doesn't mean they bill there. For example Skype bills via Luxembourg.

Stripe "is"/"was" also European :)

Stripe has never been European, it was always headquartered and operated out of the US.

It'd be like claiming that SpaceX is South African.

https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...

And that Amazon is Portuguese...

As far as I can tell, the founders are Irish but the company has always been American.

Ow ok. Perhaps because they where Irish, I remembered it differently

They didn't "ditch" PayPal, at least not according to the e-mail I saw. They merely made it a non-default option. It's not like you can't still use PayPal.

Nooooo, oh good, PayPal is available till 2023.

Absolutely 100% did not see that coming.

Stripe/Braintree are a lot better than PayPal. PayPal will never take your processing history into consideration if their algorithms decide that your account is connected to some account with past violations. This happened when my developer used his API keys on our production resulting in our account with 1M+ revenue/2 years (very few chargebacks if any) of operation banned. As a small startup, it was a death sentence for our business, finding another processor at high volume is difficult when you've no history to show!

Braintree is owned by PayPal

But the brand name matters. My previous company selling online product to typical non-tech audience, and majority US customer insist on Paypal.

My guess is it's even more popular outside the US, or anywhere where credit cards aren't that common - like europe. We link our banking account to Paypal and use it to have instant payments (and fulfillment) without credit cards. You can't expect people to own credit cards over here.

Not sure if UK is an outlier here but credit cards are the norm for us.

Almost every payment processor accept debit cards, which is widely used in europe.

But many people are very reluctant about signing up with their debit card details with too many companies, at least I know I am.

Unlike CC you don't get a new number/have half a dozen of different ones of them. So it's a quite a bit more of a hassle should the payment service provider ever have a breach/leak.

Many people didn't like to sign up with PayPal to begin with but, due to its dominance with eBay it was a bitter pill most people just swallowed to do their eBay buying and selling.

Didn’t get a lawyer involved?

I've avoided paypal for ages because of their heavy handedness with freezes and bans.

They just can't be trusted not to fuck over your business. Not intentionally... but algorithmically. And once that happens their customer support rarely seems to be able to fix the issue.

They just don't seem to care about false positive vendor issues.

I had an issue with my paypal account in Australia where they thought it was ok to pull money out of my credit card when it expired. This failed of course and so they decided to just put me into a negative balance. They never emailed me until about a year later when they threatened to send debt collectors... so I added my singapore credit card. However I couldn’t. It would fail to accept the card. Support told me that my card was stolen because I’m using a singapore card on an Australian account. In the end not having an Aussie bank account or card I was forced to open a new singapore account, send money to the old account. Then close both accounts...

Na na na na Na na na na Hey hey hey Goodbye

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