Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation
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That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s).
As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!
I imagine, with the huge spike in ecommerce, your platforms are crushing it, but curious to hear your take.
- Enterprises pivoting -- brands going direct-to-consumer, malls pivoting to online business models (seriously), and other things like that.
- SMBs going online: see this thread[0] from a French fruit seller, for example, or this thread[1] from a bar in Milwaukee. The restaurant down the street from where I used to live is now running a rapidly-growing online wine club.
- Totally new startups are getting started in response to new needs.
[0] https://twitter.com/FlorentSchmahl/status/125028359535832678...
[1] https://twitter.com/danimalnelson/status/1240004111669460992
This also makes me more aware of my spending, since I need to manually keep topping up the account.
I haven't used a debit card in years to maximize benefits (altho I sometimes use cash when required by small businesses), but the Capital One debit card advertises $0 Fraud Liability https://www.capitalone.com/bank/debit-card/.
What are the strategies/thoughts in the industry? Holding and batching payments on a per-user basis? Trying to get agreements so you can batch payments on a per-processor or per-network agreement? Hourly? Daily? Weekly?
That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging cheaper payment methods).
Maybe batch them per user per website, that will solve statement descriptors a bit
If Stripe were willing to allow third parties to act as a batching passthrough (or if I was wrong and you do!), this seems like a low-cost way to let the market decide what an acceptable refund/statement descriptor regime should look like.
The various US credit card & processing companies have an extraordinary thing going for themselves. Visa and Mastercard have cartel-like margins (Visa's operating income margin for 4Q19 was 66%, you don't see that outside of maybe illicit drug operations or Facebook's monopoly in its earlier thinner incarnation pre-Russiagate). They're super sensitive to giving any ground on their fee levels, out of fear (correctly so) that they'll never get them back.
Before the market drop, Visa was worth more than all publicly traded banks in Europe combined (frankly that may still be true post market drop, as Visa hasn't declined all that much).
Visa etc are now only allowed to charge a percentage, 0.2-0.3%, but the intermediate (Stripe etc) can still add a flat-rate fee.
Payment requests are accumulated and batched, combined with "capping" of travel costs (eg max/day, weekly discounts etc).
One thing I'd love you guys to do is create your own QuickBooks connection app. Most companies offer their own - yours is through Sush.io with your logo and bad ratings. I can't get it to work and I'm not the only one.
1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it.
2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transactions in the EU, where most of our customers are. Instead, because we're selling from Australia, we get charged 2.9% for some arbitrary reason. This coupled with 1) puts our all-in transaction fees at 5%+ :(
3) I think billing the vendor for refund fees is a really retrograde step - it increases friction in the decision for us when a customer asks for a refund, and industry wide is going to cause less happy customers and less card users online. It's already hard enough convincing Dutch/German customers to use a credit card online.
If any non-EU companies know a cheaper way to process transactions in the EU, I'm all ears...
On (1), we started an FX team this year. (There are a lot of legal complexities here around how the funds move, who has title to what at which moment, and so on.) But we're investing significantly in improving it and it should get better soon. On (2), the core issue is card network pricing rules -- by design, they discriminate on the basis of where the business is located. We happily extend EU fees to all EU legal entities, however, and would be happy to work with you to set that up. On (3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly.
Still, all the issues you bring up are real and I'd like us to find better solutions.
I hope Stripe which is amazing will never have anything to do with TransferFraud.
We've moved hundreds of thousands of dollars through them over the last couple of years with no problems on their end (we've had problems with banks failing to transfer correctly though..)
OTOH, I'm in Canada, and I've only used them for personal transfers. I have no idea how they perform for businesses, nor do I know whether they work well for individuals in other countries.
My only issues with TransferWise have been having to ask recipients for their full addresses and then manually having to translate address schemes into something that fits in the boxes TransferWise provides in their forms. Sometimes things don't map over 1-to-1 (some Japanese and Taiwanese addresses, for example). I've also found that some Japanese banks only have one branch without a name and Transferwise requires a branch name. I eventually figured things out by researching the branch number online though.
All minor gripes though. Transferwise has let my business operate smoothly and make connections to vendors that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to pay.
I am biased, but IMHO using a service like Routefusion solves all of these problems. Companies like Elliot use our API's to settle CC transactions that are in different countries. You hook your Stripe account in and then they re-patriate the money to wherever it needs to go.
Check us out! developer.routefusion.co
Customer Service, UX and speed are amazing. But it took me a while to convince US companies to accept this structure.
I understand they're not free, but I also understand Stripe does get a considerable portion back that they are no longer passing on?
Couldn't this just have been applied to the problematic businesses then rather than all?
In our analysis in making this change, we saw that this simply makes little difference for the vast majority of businesses. For example, if you're processing $100k/year and refund 5% of your payments (which would be on the high end of normal), it works out to about $12/month.
While refund rate of course is not definitively coupled to the quality of a business, we do see across our portfolio that it is strongly correlated. Given a basket of possible fees (for example, higher fees on Amex, which most other providers have), we prefer the fees that, on the margin, are least consequential for the businesses that are doing the best job of serving their customers.
Having said all of that, none of our pricing is cast in stone, and we always genuinely appreciate feedback, including contrary views.
Stripe has made the right call here - though the silent and vast majority won't have anything to complain about so won't be on here posting.
Do you know how often I have people buy something and then call me only to let me know they may have bought the wrong thing?
If you ISL6258AHRTZ & ISL6259AHRTZ, your refunds are likely not due to "business quality."
If you sell NXP610A3B and NXP1608, your refunds likely don't "business quality."
They reflect reality in a world where most people aren't savants with random long strings of seemingly meaningless letters/numbers that make up product codes for chipsets.
I used to employ a competitor in this field. We have taken different approaches to obtaining customers, and in setting up our respective online stores to be as simple as possible - to try and inform people what fits what even if they don't know what they are doing.
But lots of people don't read, then they buy things by mistake anyway.
>While refund rate of course is not definitively coupled to the quality of a business, we do see across our portfolio that it is strongly correlated. Given a basket of possible fees (for example, higher fees on Amex, which most other providers have), we prefer the fees that, on the margin, are least consequential for the businesses that are doing the best job of serving their customers.
What metrics are being used here to judge the quality of a business? How is whether a business is "quality" or not being judged by a credit card processing provider? What information is obtained to make judgments according to these metrics?
I've been in different online and in-person businesses. Some businesses have low refund rate with poor quality, others high refund rate with fine quality. I can say with certainty 100% of the refunds I gave when people sent back a product that was not the product I sent them(or even a product I sell) after they filed a chargeback had nothing to do with the quality of our business - the only thing the merchant would have access to is a he-said-she-said list of jpg files and ranting paragraphs. Hardly fitting information to judge the quality of a business on.
Honestly, I've looked as Stripe's offerings - I pay 2.15% right now with 40/60 online card not present/in-store card present and refunds are free. How is it with a 2.9% fee that people who rarely refund their customers have to pay the fee for those customers for the model to make sense? I'm not asking Stripe to match the fee of a large bank - but can we not charge an additional .7 percent and then say "it has to be done so we don't lose when people refund?"
This is outside the greater implications of this policy - if more merchant services take this on, we will be left with a world where only Amazon, eBay, and Walmart can offer "cancel" buttons on their site. Who will want to do business with small businesses if even something as basic as hitting the cancel button incurs fees?
If I buy a TV, or an ultrasonic cleaner, or a stereo, or some furniture from a small business vs amazon and I mess up something in my order, I have to pay a $45 fee - but when I buy it from amazon, I don't? Screw them, I'll use amazon.
If this is adopted by every single business, it will be just one of many factors that pushes customers in the direction of using Amazon over small businesses. It's hard enough competing with trillion dollar companies as is without erroneous fees being added in that were outside the overton window of business discussion 10 years ago.
To be clear, I have no problem with people choosing to make purchases from Amazon. I do have an issue with the industry slowly adding barriers to small businesses having the ability to compete on a level playing field. I'm all for them earning a good reputation, but we shouldn't be working to put sour tastes in the mouths of every customer who f'd up and made an order in error with someone that they will not have with a larger company.
> They reflect reality in a world where most people aren't savants with random long strings of seemingly meaningless letters/numbers that make up product codes for chipsets.
If you're selling products to people who aren't intimate enough with the product to tell them apart, and not doing a good enough job of guiding them before they put down their hard earned money, you're failing your customers. So it is very tied to business quality.
You should have warnings, or clear break downs of product descriptions they can use to confirm.
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A refund is not free for the user either, now they have to go and get a refund, hope they caught it quick enough for shipping, maybe ship it back.
So there is, almost by definition, no situation where you have a high refund rate, and aren't making your customers suffer, and that's not how a quality business is run
Patrick, please don't do that. It's scummy maths and unworthy of you. Either "if you're doing $8k/month it work out to about $12/month" or "if you're doing $100k/year it would work out to about $145/year" would be better. Using different units for the two different figures to make them look further apart is the kind of thing done by people trying to mislead with data.
Most people think of those kinds of expenses in monthly terms, maybe you're not aware of that. This isn't a press release, it's someone's comment off the top of their head.
developer.routefusion.co
we will solve all of those nasty FX problems your customers are having. Already doing it for a few other e-comm platforms that link into Stripe.
This way regular members are not penalized by big refunders...
A lot of subscription based businesses were built around "no-hassle refunds" as a core feature enabled by Stripe and will now need to rethink this.
However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you.
EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speaking of credit cards. We do all have and use debit cards, however, those are of a national scheme with wonderfully low fees, but no online usability.
How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they can't pay because they're technologically illiterate.
which wouldn't be a problem for shopping online if they had a Visa or MasterCard cobrand, as these can be debit and tied to your bank account as well.
It's only slowly changing with some Sparkassen issuing MasterCard debit cobranded cards in late fall (https://www.f-i.de/News/ITmagazin/Archiv/2020/Einfach-mobil-...)
That's a peculiar choice, but I assume the decision was made to appeal to the typically skeptical German market. I do wonder why it wasn't made opt-in, though.
When asking around I got several answers. Everything from a cultural aversion to debt (and spending via cash makes it easier to track your spending), not wanting to be tracked where you shop due to not wanting the government to know (comes from Nazi/East German past), and just being culturally conservative and not really liking change all that much.
I didn't like it as being a tourist meant I was eating out a lot, etc. I had to carry a lot of cash around that I'd only have to pay a fee to convert back if I had any left.
As for why we're so cash positive: one of the factors is privacy. If you pay for everything electronically both your bank and merchants are in the position to build a profile on you. If you use a non-local scheme (e.g. MC or Visa), they can too.
I think the confusing part of your comment was where you consider non-credit cards (debit, prepaid etc.) to be distinct from VISA/Mastercard. That is not the case in most countries. It used to be the case in Germany, but is slowly changing as more and more debit cards are VISA/Mastercard cobranded.
Debit card means you're responsible and take money out of low/zero interest checking account at the principal bank where we Germans hoard our money.
Credit card means you're on shaky financial ground, deal with credit card companies with their fine print, risk punitive overdraft charges, and have probably no idea if you have any money left.
Sadly, things are changing and many people seem to take on irresponsible loans (i.e. for anything except real estate).
Associating Mastercard and Visa to credit and not debit as well.
I have a credit card, but it is paid in full at the end of the month automatically, so for all intents and purposes it's essentially another debit card. Everyone I know in Germany who has a credit card uses it this way. In fact, my bank didn't even ask me if I wanted it set up any differently, so I have to imagine it's not just my social circle handling it this way.
Many UK banks used to issue Switch/Maestro cards which interoperated with the German bank card system so were accepted in German supermarkets, but these got phased out for Visa / MasterCard debit around 10 years ago meaning I had to start using cash everywhere.
When the EU capped the interchange fees in 2015, many retailers started accepting MasterCard and Visa here. AMEX is exempt from the regulation since it's a three-party system and less commonly accepted. I'm not aware of any retailers that accept MC/Visa debit, but not credit cards or vice versa.
Mostly banks and retailers colluding together to use a cheap domestic-only POS-only scheme (think Przelewy24, but offline or LINK but at POS).
In Germany, most banks still see these use cases as an opportunity to upsell their loyal customers on their expensive credit card products (not in terms of interest really, but rather because of high monthly and foreign use fees).
The interesting thing however, we A/B tested with and without SEPA and basically saw no difference. Only German people used it, but when it wasn’t available they managed to find a credit card or use PayPal.
I’d love it if banks were making instant payments simple and verifiable, but SEPA feels like something from the 70s to me.
These concerns still apply to direct debits, unfortunately. The reason being that there's barely any authorization for direct debits, you just need the bank account number and name. Isn't the situation somewhat similar to CC transactions without 3D Secure/whatever it's called? I seems to recall reading in my bank's terms that I can chargeback transactions for something crazy like a year. You always need a "mandate" to debit an account and if you get that properly signed by the customer, you should be able to get the bank to reverse the reversal, but I can appreciate the bureaucratic overhead.
I was only offering it as a potential solution if getting people to sign up is genuinely difficult.
The thing with PayPal is: they offer direct debit to customers and I'm assuming that's how most people who would've otherwise used direct debit directly with you ended up paying. It is my understanding that PayPal is also aware of the risks associated with this and offers merchants the option not to accept payments through it. I can't seem to find an article just now, but I remember instances where PayPal told me something along the lines of "this merchant does not accept payments via direct debit, please use a credit card instead". I can only assume this is because they at least partially pass on the risk.
That's unfortunately not true. There is no recourse to direct debit returns; there is no dispute resolution process or anything like that. The presence or absence of a mandate only impacts the timeframe for returns to be files, as far as I understand.
You are aware that this is possible with credit cards as well, right?
1) SEPA has an 8-week no-questions no-appeal refund model, which is fundamentally incompatible with a SaaS business
2) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on Checkout
3) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on non-EU/US accounts
Regarding 1): is it? Credit card payments can also be charged back, often for a period longer than 8 weeks. And both "aaS" products as well as certain retailers selling and shipping physical goods, do offer direct debit. I can't quote any fraud rates, but it certainly seems possible to do it.
SEPA doesn't. You have to sue your customer if you want the money back.
https://www.williamfry.com/newsandinsights/news-article/2013...
This used to be very common in supermarkets. Every time you had to sign the receipt this was happening. It's not as common nowadays as the fees are now more or less the same.
I deal a lot in USD as an Australian company but stripe won’t allow us to charge in USD and settle into our USD bank accounts. But others will.
Also the refund issue is crazy, no other provider we use does it.
By the way, my company has the opposite problem. Our Stripe account is registered in the UK and even though we process payments for Australian customers in AUD their local banks still charge them an extortionate "foreign transaction fee". This means that we had to open a separate Stripe account registered in Australia just to avoid that.
Care flicking me an email at dalan@stripe.com or DMing @StripeAustralia?
Depending on your volume, it's really not expensive to setup a legal entity in the UK. Since UK is leaving (unsure if EU financial access will continue) Ireland is a good alternative. A UK company costs < £100/yr to maintain. Depending on your volume, it may be worth exploring with your lawyer/accountant.
Perhaps there's merchant-of-record services too, that are incorporated in the EU and I believe legally act as an agent to sell your product.
A UK company costs < £100/yr to maintain
Off the top of my head, the Companies House filing fee of around £15/yr, an address for the company (around £50/yr) are all you require to hold a UK company.
For a tech company that uses Xero and feeds in invoices programmatically filing the statutory returns by an accountant might cost £1000/yr (or 0 if you wish to DIY, the UK's HMRC makes self-filing easy unlike the IRS). Plus £360/yr for Xero (free accounting software probably won't cut it).
VAT returns and PAYE returns are pretty easy to self-file; Xero does them automatically and HMRC provides free software for it. The annual statutory accounts are more difficult, and you probably want an accountant.
Rough figures: if you want to be cheap, use Xero discounts and DIY, it's around £500/yr. With an accountant, but you still doing some of the work, perhaps £1500/yr.
We charge in USD because we serve primarily US customers.
I pay for the business expenses in USD.
I've opened a US/USD bank account with Transferwise.
But I can't use it with Stripe [1]. Their only choice is to have them convert our USD earnings to AUD and pay out to an AUD bank account.
So when I pay those business expenses, I'm either:
a) paying on an Australian debit or credit card, which charge us another 3% for every international transaction (3% seems to be the standard rate across all of our banks here), or
b) carefully managing our cash flow to transfer AUD to our Transferwise account, use TW to exchange to USD, and then pay with our TW card.
We did (a) for a while, now trying (b), but I'd love to see (c): Stripe pays our USD earnings to our USD bank account.
[1] Funnily/strangely enough, I can actually ADD the USD bank account to our Stripe account. It just sits there, lonely, with a 0.00 USD balance. It took reading through the docs to realise that USD payouts are not supported for Australian Stripe accounts.
"Since US Covid shutdown (as of March 13th) Stripe US processing volume is up X% or $Y billion."
This general information would provide great context to the health of the US economy and e-commerce. I know other companies such as payroll processing (ADP) release numbers and the stock market uses those as an input to the health of the economy.
Will you continue to originate new Strike Capital offers? When?
Chargebee does this on top of Stripe.
(There are hacky workarounds - but likely not worth the effort)
Either way, thanks for the feedback!
To explain where we're coming from here, I personally learned a classic first-time entrepreneur lesson the hard way some years ago: if we're not a payments business then we should focus on what we are, not on payment mechanics.
The first time I started a B2C, I naively thought I could do better, and to be fair, I really did implement a simple, robust, flexible system that fit our needs well. But over time, even the better payment services started breaking APIs and neglecting documentation and dropping customer service standards and increasing prices, and maintaining those integrations became painful. Governments started changing their regulations and tax rules, and updating our systems to keep up with the ever-changing compliance and tax obligations become painful too. We also found that fraud and chargebacks weren't a significant problem for us, but surprisingly, churn due to unreliable card charges was unbelievably bad and could turn an otherwise healthy growth rate negative all on its own, which was not a good combination with the aforementioned drop in standards at the payment services.
What we're now looking for, in a nutshell, is a service to which we can outsource payment processing, subscription management, and all of the sales tax collection, reporting and remittance obligations. I don't want to use APIs or webhooks any more than I absolutely have to. I want to fill in correct, context-aware, all-inclusive prices on our pricing page with ideally one line of code. I want to hand our customers off smoothly to a well-designed, batteries-included sign-up flow with ideally one line of code. I want a simple notification to reach my server when a customer has paid us so we can have our systems respond accordingly, and I want simple notifications if anything has gone wrong so we can contact our customer or payment service and deal with it.
I do not want to know what the current sales tax rates are in Western Nowhere, Somecountry, and I certainly do not want to have to sign up for a government programme and file reports and remit taxes there because once upon a time we had one customer who signed up for one month and we collected 1.50 Nowheredollars in sales tax.
I do not want to have any UI on my site and therefore any code behind it for upgrading, downgrading, cancelling, refunding, retrying failed charges or sending flowers on my customer's birthday, except to the extent that we provide a simple way for a customer to indicate they want to do something and we can then hand off the mechanics to the payment service if we agree, again ideally with one line of code.
I do want a simple, effective dashboard facility on the payment service that lets me see and control all of those things (well, maybe not the flowers) and any other relevant settings if I want to, and I want it to be somebody else's problem to implement and maintain that facility.
I don't know what proportion of our revenues we'd be willing to give up for a service like that, but it would be far higher than anything we pay to any payment service today.
Then we read their legal terms, found about half a dozen obvious deal-breakers, and lost all interest.
1. reserves the right to unilaterally vary the contract in any way, with immediate effect and without actively notifying the merchant
2. ensures that if anything goes wrong, any legal action against it by its merchants would have to be taken in another country and under another legal system, even if Paddle operates in the merchant's own country
3. takes extensive control of the product or service they are selling on their merchant's behalf, to the extent that they can sell it to whoever they want, sell it at whatever price they want, give demos to whoever they want, etc.
4. requires that any software it is selling on behalf of its merchants be bug-free, and that the merchants accept liability for anything bad that happens if it isn't.
It's hard to take any service seriously when it has terms like that in its standard agreement. Unless these kinds of terms are unenforceable where you are (or where Paddle is, given the above?) and you have a legal opinion telling you so that you trust enough to bet your entire business on it, it seems like you'd have to be crazy to accept them.
I've seen some very one-sided terms from other payment services before, but I take them at their word that those terms are typically required by the giants behind the systems like the card networks and banking groups. I think some of those should be also be unenforceable by law, but right now that seems to be the price of admission. I've never seen anyone else seriously suggesting the kinds of terms that Paddle is, though.
Edit: Changed to present tense, after checking Paddle's legal terms of use at the time of writing at https://paddle.com/legal/ to confirm that these criticisms are still current. The first two points above are in the preamble at the start of the document. The third is under 4.2 and 6.1. The fourth is under 13.1(ii) and 13.2(ii).
That might have been the intent, but I see nothing in the terms that restricts the scope of those I mentioned to that situation.
And the general "we can change anything we like and you can't easily sue us ever" would be inappropriate even in that situation.
I assume their legal teams have scoured through Paddle's terms of use
I respectfully suggest that this is an extremely dangerous assumption when you're talking about a binding legal agreement and the future of your business.
I've occasionally had a real lawyer look at the terms for some very popular online services that we were considering using, particularly when I thought they looked risky, and received formal advice along the lines of, "Run away. Don't walk. Run."
We are one of the larger SaaS companies and as a personal lover of Stripe, it was surprising to me that you couldn’t customise these systems, esp at our volume.
We switched to Ayden and saw very significant revenue increases in those countries; because valid cards stopped getting declined.
I used the "beta" react hooks integration, and the UX of getting it all set up was basically flawless. I found the documentation (especially the quickstarts/tutorials) to be incredibly helpful.
Four pieces of constructive feedback:
- There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure.
- I found the API documentation to be very good on big screens, but relatively painful on smaller screens.
- On my personal laptop (an older thinkpad), scrolling through the docs was unresponsive at times. In general, I'm a fan of the "everything-on-one-page" approach, because it makes grepping the docs easier. But I think that the quantity of dynamic elements in the API interferes with this approach :/
- I don't appreciate applications that hijack ctrl+f. I appreciate that you can double click to get native browser search, and that this is explained in the modal, but I really wonder if this helps people navigate more efficiently. I appreciate that the work that's gone into this feature must be very impressive, but I'd prefer a search bar with a different hotkey than ctrl+f. Might be worth AB testing.
Ending on a note of praise, the dashboard experience is incredible. Huge kudos on how far it's come, and how easy it is for nontechnical people to use and discover.
Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when looking for recipes/tutorials you run into a lot of seemingly duplicative content which makes it confusing to figure out which is right for you. I had this issue trying to create Connected Payments, specifically.
Not something I'm likely to be looking at in the nearish future, but the next time I need to do some refactoring/rolling out a new Stripe feature, I'll definitely drop you a line with my thoughts. Thanks for the heads up!
Eventually I just picked one and it seemd to work out really well though. I've also recently been working with the slack docs and they're the total extreme, 8 different guides with similar names and various different deprecation notices around.
On the upside I felt like having both recipes was really useful to get a good overview of the options and possibilities. I'm really happy with my implementation now and I don't think slotting in Connect should be too tricky. Using the stipe docs was a breath of freshair compared to the Slack api docs which I've been using recently and have been an abysmal experience filled with hundreds of open browser tabs.
Based on many support conversations with me trying to get a feature built here over the last year, Stripe's "official position" appears to be "never test your production application." Sometimes they say "do it but only for $1 every other month", which is functionally the same as saying "don't ever test production." if you don't have any products or services for $1 and do regular deployments.
I understand the reasons why you don't want people using live credit cards to test in production (e.g. factoring), but that isn't what I think most users want to do (it is not what we want to use). We don't want to use real cards at all but we want to test production.
The best answer to customers who want to test in production is to give them the ability to safety test live cards. Please see the attached specification I pulled together which would solve this problem for Stripe, card networks, and your customers. If Stripe cannot implement some feature like "Safe Live Testing", then we will ultimately be forced to migrate away from Stripe. This is a critical feature for us, and I am sure many customers.
https://tidy-static-websites.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stri...
We thought our integration with stripe was down in production last week, and we could not run any checks to tell if that was actually the case. This would have fixed it for us.
I think there is also a cultural issue here because I believe any mention of "production testing" is currently falling in the compliance camp of Stripe. Which means their job is to prevent fraud, but nobody seems to say "its ok to want this. The response every time from support and compliance teams is basically "you are bad to test in production, never do it." But they instead should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. This is a gap on our side, and we should fix it." If there is an issue with Visa/Mastercard agreements or something, then they should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. We are completely unable to support it because Visa has this rule that says X, we are working with them to change it. Here is how you can contact Visa to express your support for the rule change, we are spearheading a campaign to ensure customers can do this."
I hope this feedback is helpful, and while the "spec" is not very good, I did put substantial effort into thinking through a solution here, so I hope you review it and get it to the right team. I will also email, thanks!
We had one hick-up, which was the fault of a wrong PHP setting and we got several duplicate orders as a result. In the stripe dashboard I could clearly see failed webhooks in the post mortem. So if there were some kind of email alarm if an error threshold is exceeded that would be nice. I did not find any such feature, if I should have missed it please point me towards the right direction. Cheers.
The company I work for is in the travel industry and we've received a large number of charge backs compared to normal. Our agents are working as best as they can, but our tools were never really designed for 5000+ tickets to be active at 1 time, so it's slow going for them as they contact the guest, then contact the provider, then talk to the guest, etc.
Are you going to offer some lenience to companies who have gotten a huge spike in charge backs just due to an increase time in support tickets?
We are trying to find ways to just refund the guest where we know the hotel has closed, but there's no master list of that so we can't just blindly refund everybody
Many companies in travel (and similarly affected industries) are having challenges shaped similarly to yours. There is a very active conversation in the industry about what we can do about the standard process for chargebacks to support this better. (Chargebacks were never designed to be a massively high-volume simultaneous event.)
Concretely you could imagine some specific consequences of chargebacks. I don’t have anything specific that I can share as of this exact minute with respect to each of those concrete consequences, but we’re working on this very actively. A lot of this work requires coordination with other firms. Chargebacks are broadly adjudicated by banks with reference to the rules established by the card networks, so we have limited control over per-chargeback decisions, but the industry is moving quickly on trying to decide what to do about this sort of chargeback given the circumstances.
As always, we’re in the corner of companies trying to do the right thing. As you get through this, if there’s specific things we can help on, please flag them to us; we can’t promise saying yes to every request but we can promise you’ll have our attention.
So much so that we are actively implementing a new provider as backup so we aren’t stranded if we get cut off.
It would be great if Stripe Checkout included VAT-related features:
* Detect country and - if needed - add appropriate VAT
* Allow customer to add a valid VAT number, so that when appropriate tax is not charged
* Offer clear reporting on what VAT has been collected for each jurisdiction
I realise this is a big, big can of worms. But that’s why we use Stripe, right? For help handling that big can of worms that is international payment collections. :)
But I've been asking Stripe for this since 2015. I don't know what info I can possibly offer you that you surely haven't heard from tons of customers over the years.
There must be hundreds (thousands?) of apps using this integration and all of them have been stuck in limbo for many months now. We would like to enable SCA, but the beta version of this project doesn't seem to have documentation beyond a few comments in github issues here and there, and the discord is almost solely populated by people asking how to use the beta and no one can answer them.
I think whichever of the major payment platforms extends a hand out to the React-Native community first, with a confident, well documented official project, will be celebrated and would cement themselves as THE payment platform for people using React-Native.
@chris_trag from Stripe here. The React Native situation is very much top-of-mind and we're working on the right lasting solution for your business and the RN community.
When we had submitted the PRs to provide 3D Secure / SCA support, we had not anticipated the work would be left on an experimental branch for this amount of time.
This spring we've been able to connect with the previous maintainers and understand the business situation behind this community repo. With all things open source, we want to be mindful of projects that are run by the community while determining which key libraries not in active development/maintenance.
All this to say, peace of mind and clarity on how React Native devs can implement Stripe with ease is a priority and I apologize for the limbo you've been in.
Thank you so much for your patience as we pull the remediation together.
Happy to chat directly as well -> trag at stripe dot com
The only reason we are not using Stripe is the lack of support for Finnish payment methods - around 70% of our retail website customers pay using the local "bank buttons" and 10% use local mobile payments (MobilePay, Pivo).
1) Stripe docs are inaccurate. They frequently don't work exactly as they describe for given subscription workflows. Sometimes an API call is entirely wrong, sometimes it doesn't return the data the docs indicate, and sometimes the arguments it describes just doesn't exist. (Yes, I've ensured I'm using the latest API version in use).
2) The docs have no changelog. There's an API changelog that indicates when API's change, there's nothing indicating when entire chunks of the documentation change on the website, along with the recommended way to integrate. The most obvious example of this is that the subscription workflow docs got a huge makeover in the past year (sometime), with some really great flowchart diagrams. But back to point #1, some of the API calls listed here are not actually valid. If I've just missed the changelog for the website docs, please point me in the right direction. :)
For reference, I'm using Node at the moment, but I've also integrated with Python, and there were breaker bugs in those docs as well. I eventually end up reading the HTTP API docs, then going through the SDK's to see where they went wrong, or the docs went wrong.
I'd like to add a few points, especially those considering Stripe vs Paypal
This: Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved.
We are very thankful to Stripe because Paypal left us high and dry
We found out they were calling up our customers and pretty much forcing them to do disputes
They also locked our funds FOR SIX MONTHS
If we did not have backup funds and if we did not have Stripe we literally would not be able to continue as a company
Paypal basically have ZERO consideration of the fact that you are running a business and that your payment provider should not just randomly end the business arrangement
Our dispute rate for the last $1.5 million processed through Stripe is roughly 0.3% whereas with Paypal it was considerably higher. I even have saved emails from our customers of Paypal asking them to open disputes even when they said they were happy and did not want to
Even eBay stopped using Paypal, and switched to Adeyn
consider how extreme things have to be if the company from which you were spun off as a separate company (eBay spun off Paypal), even they stop working with you
Stripe is much, much better than Paypal
Most importantly, it is much more dependable, much more small business and startup friendly, and developer first mentality
Paypal always has the attitude of - We're big and we don't give two hoots about you
Whereas Stripe they will always talk to you as a fellow human being
*
Stripe: The CEO is coming here to Hacker News and personally responding As are various members of the Stripe Team
Paypal: Will freeze your account for no reason at all. Will not even respond. The lady on the phone will shout at you even though you are politely asking why account is frozen. Plus as a bonus they will freeze funds for SIX Months
They froze funds equal to TWENTY TIMES the total disputes and refunds combined total from the Past 5 years. For SIX MONTHS
Also, if anyone at PayPal reads it: screw you, I will never give you a damn cent.
If someone makes a purchase of a $1500 ultrasonic cleaner from me, and then realizes they made a mistake, I now have to tell them there’s a $43.50 restocking fee, even if they call me 2 minutes after they place the order. This will leave a disgusting taste in the customer’s mouth, but I have to do it, because I can’t expose myself to a $43.50 fee for something I have zero control over. That customer may eventually notice that Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, do not charge such a fee. The customer has no idea why – they just know dealing with Amazon means less friction. The customer will now utilize Amazon more.
Many will say that this is a dumb gripe. “If you don’t like it go somewhere else!” PayPal instituted this policy as well. They backed down temporarily after people made a stink about it, but months later continued forward with the policy. I currently use a merchant services provider that does not implement these fees, but for how long?
My time in my industry has taught me that companies will often wait for one “outlier” to make controversial reforms to their platform/products before doing it themselves. Whether it is gluing the battery inside of a cellphone, or adding strange fees to transactions. Once a profitable, anti-consumer move succeeds with the company not going out of business, it emboldens other firms to do the same.
My merchant services provider doesn’t charge this fee. Yet. But they saw Stripe charge it, and get away with it. They saw PayPal charge it and have another more profitable quarter. The outrage lasted a week, the increased profit lasted forever. “Gee, it isn’t a business killer after all. Maybe we should do it too!” will come up in corporate boardrooms across America.
Then, we’re left with a landscape where the only companies left in ecommerce who can offer customers friction-free order cancellations are Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Who wants that? Yes, people can say “just absorb the fee if you don’t want your customers to be mad at you.” How? I am already competing as a dude with no outside financing with a trillion dollar company – I’m winning if I am making any sales at all! Now I’m expected to compete on price when I have to absorb fees when customers cancel an order?
Let’s say you manage to claw your way into a market by offering a better product, or after sales service on that product to the point where you can compete with Amazon. That is a miracle in and of itself. To then have to deal with a minefield of additional charges that your competitor doesn’t have to is just another nail in the coffin of small-business ecommerce.
I find it awful, and I protest using these services. I cut my exposure to paypal by about 95% and dodged a bullet in not signing up for stripe. I suggest the same to my listenership anytime someone brings up or mentions a merchant services provider that I know charges this fee. Even if they say it won't affect their business much because they do not deal with lots of cancellations, it is the greater implication I make them aware of. No one wants a market where the only companies with a free "cancel order" button on their site are eBay and Amazon.
Scott Galloway also has a lot of excellent content with arguments on breaking up Amazon. Whether or not one agrees with his solutions or assessments of the problems Amazon creates and how to fix them – it is clear that they are dominating the race. I am not suggesting that we hold Amazon back – just that we don’t purposely trip companies doing their best to keep up.
Many of our customers prefer this method over card payments. Then Stripe would fully cover our payment use-case; I'd love to use Stripe alone for payment, analytics and security. Right now we can't :(
Faster checkout. And improved trust (somehow).
I hear you folks acquired fast.co which seems to be a step in this direction. Entering card details on every site is problematic. Some customers are still worried about it and prefer to use PayPal. Indeed, when I offer both as an option, and make clear Stripe payments go via Stripe and we don't see details, about 80% of people choose to pay with PayPal.
Stripe Checkout, being on your platform and not our sites, seems to be a step in the right direction. I'd also like to see faster payments. My opinion: checkout takes too long. Sites making people create accounts, go through 4 pages and then enter card is bad.
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I think, honestly, integrating fast.co into Stripe and making it highly encouraged is the future. Go a step further and encourage sites to stop making users create accounts. SSO-style system, perhaps, but easy to integrate. Authentication is a pain for me as a customer on sites - I have too many accounts and it drains a lot of time combined. I really think your company has the power to make a difference to this problem.
Perhaps I'm being too cynical, and perhaps Stripe is taking a more enlightened view than I'm giving it credit for, but my goodness this trend of large businesses just raising money forever (and long after they cease being startups) is frustrating. At least at Google I know I can actually spend all of my paycheck at some point in the decade after I've earned it.
Just to be clear, I've never worked at Stripe and have no personal bone to pick. I just think it's a shame that all this wealth generation is happening, and not only is the public frozen out of the growth, many of the talented people who made it happen are _also_ frozen out as well.
Private markets being so flush with cash while regular folks are strapped, on the other hand, is a sign that the tax code is too lenient and we should be re-purposing those dollars for societal benefit. _There_ is the moral failing.
To see such a dangerous, totalitarian ideology expressed so casually is terrifying.
Totalitarian? Does the economy exist to serve man or itself? There should be nothing scary about suggesting that the current framework doesn't serve society as well as it could.
Companies boast of record profits, buy back stock constantly, and pay next to nothing in taxes. Meanwhile, even with the ACA Americans scrimp and save, paying outrageous amounts for paltry healthcare that most of the First World would find totally inadequate. Education is chronically underfunded and over-regulated. Student debt is a ticking time bomb.
All of these problems could be resolved in an instant, had we the political will to solve them. Is it totalitarian to wish for a modern single-payer health system? Is it totalitarian to want my children to have access to a good education like I had in the 80s? Is it wrong to ask those who benefit most from society, to pay their fair share? I don't think so. Neither of us want boots on the ground, so to speak.
I love the slick interface, but it's simply not worth the thousands per year I'll be saving with the switch.
For me the main selling point for any payment processor is the minimization of fees. Sure, the API's are nice, but I already use a payment gateway for that.
I'm a few clicks away from saving thousands. Am I missing anything?
One thing I notice is, I get much less fraudulent payments through PayPal, and when I do get them it's handled automatically (and most of the time they end up being not fraud because PayPal investigated it and released the funds). 100% hands free, $0 in fees.
With Stripe, not only do I get more fraudulent payments but you need to pay $15 as a dispute fee through Stripe when you lose the case and pretty much all fraud causes through Stripe will be lost (because it's actual fraud). It also takes like 20 minutes to fill out the forms, create fax-compatible sized screenshots and a lot of other boilerplate information if you plan to contest the dispute.
It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.
Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs and yeah I'm in the same boat as you. Stripe is no longer an immediate "of course I'm going to use Stripe" decision. Braintree is looking pretty good at this point.
Honestly, you are the first person to make a good case on using PayPal over Stripe. Especially with the arbitrary horror stories I hear about PayPal all the time.
> It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.
I agree. This should be standard.
> Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs
Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.
With PayPal, the fraud experience has been nothing short of amazing. Out of many many thousands of transactions, I've only had about 3 or 4 transactions get flagged as high risk by PayPal. What this means is PayPal will hold the funds, review the transaction and then either give you the funds if it's legit or do something else if it's not legit.
I've had 0 cases on PayPal where fraud / disputes actually took place. Of those 3-4 transactions, they were all released. None of this required any intervention by me. I just got notified by email from PayPal when a high risk transaction occurred. 100% of the funds were put back into my account a few days later (short of the normal 2.9% + 30c fees).
On Stripe, I've also had many many thousands of transactions. I've had a number of fraud transactions in the process which ended up as disputes. Stripe sends out an email letting you know, but then it's now on you to decide if you want to contest the dispute. This dispute typically happens when someone who got their credit card stolen sees an unknown charge in their records.
Now you need to fill out like 8 form fields and supply screenshots and server logs of proof that someone was accessing the material they've stolen (I sell digital courses so there's no physical item). The screenshots need to be sized perfectly to be displayed in portrait mode on a sheet of paper that gets faxed over to the person reviewing it from the bank, otherwise it'll be unreadable from their perspective and you'll auto-lose the case.
Stripe doesn't let you see a real preview of these screenshots and they even alter the uploaded image size in your preview which makes it hard to preview what it will look like from the reviewer's POV even though that's the only thing that matters.
After doing that, it takes about 2-3 months to get a resolution. You get charged a $15 bank dispute fee (on top of the full amount of the product of course) which is non-refundable unless you happen to win the dispute, but if someone got their card stolen then you're not going to win the case. You also don't get any information from Stripe about the review, other than you won or lost. Stripe says it's because banks don't give them any info beyond that. Fine, that's ok, but yeah the overall experience is very very bad.
Then on top of that, Stripe sells a Radar service that you need to pay extra on top of for each transaction to get better tools to help prevent fraud before it takes place. They choose not to give it to everyone because I guess they profit from dispute fees and fraudulent transactions.
The kick in the teeth is that the data Stripe uses to train their Radar / anti-fraud service is data provided by business owners who have trusted Stripe with their business. Now they are selling that data back to us in the form of insurance fees on each transaction (the Radar service you need to pay for).
I haven't personally used Braintree yet but from what I read in their docs, you get that type of anti-fraud service baked into the normal 2.9% + 30c (don't quote me on that, but it very much reads that way on their site).
Whatever PayPal is doing (and in turn Braintree since it's a PayPal service), they're doing a fantastic job at combating fraud and disputes, especially compared to Stripe.
> Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.
Their docs are typically good, but the SCA / Payment Intents docs are not really at the same standards as the rest of their documentation yet.
Come back in a few weeks when you've implemented it.
What's interesting is I run a podcast about running web apps in production and I've had a bunch of folks come on the show who use Stripe to accept payments.
All of them have said the experience with implementing SCA with Stripe was pretty rough. These are seasoned developers running successful platforms too.
They've all done it in the last couple of months as well.
[In brief, chargebacks/disputes work differently for PayPal payments as compared to credit card payments... I suspect that much of this is mostly a PayPal vs credit card difference. But I want to understand the details.]
I am the person who asked the question that Nick responded to.
I understand PayPal has stronger network effects that may give it more leeway in handling the banks that a smaller competitor may not have.
I do agree with Nick that Radar should be a free service for all users. It reduces headaches for everyone involved. Why charge for it?
(Post to my above post if you reach HN's post limit.)
Stripe PM on the Payment Intents API here. You're right that there were some rough edges when we started rolling out this new API last year. SCA is complex and we want to help make it easy to navigate this regulation: we designed the new APIs to abstract away as much of the complexity as we can. In addition, thanks to a lot of feedback from users, we made important changes to our docs architecture, guides, API reference, and Dashboard in November 2019, and are continuing to iterate on it. I would love feedback on how we can further improve our documentation. I’m olivier@stripe.com.
With PayPal you simply send a request for a certain amount, and when it gets approved the customer's client comes back with a token and you choose to execute it or not. If you don't execute, the charge just isn't completed.
Stripe's docs says to not depend on the client because the client can close the browser window. In the PayPal case, if that happens, the transaction is simply canceled (since the client closed before finishing).
EDIT: It looks like Stripe's docs do support the PayPal style integration, but recommends against it because it doesn't work with longer-delay asynchronous methods. It's funny because PayPal's old API was done in this way (with instant payment notification webhooks) and their new API is closer to Stripe's old API.
I had low hopes because the server logs were long gone (over 90 days). However I had logs from our email provider showing reads and clicks from our emails so I sent a screenshot of that. I said Wordpress said they logged in once when they bought it and never again (of course, anyone could say that). I said their account email matched their Stripe email which had their name in it, and their IP matches where the billing address is so it seems to be a real person. I also said they'd never responded to any emails sent to them from us to resolve this.
Despite being nearly certain this was just a change-of-mind chargeback I didn't have high hopes because that's a lot of conjecture rather than evidence but it worked out.
We also had an early fraud warning giving us notice to refund and avoid the chargeback fee. I chose not to because it looked legitimate to me which was probably a mistake despite how it worked out.
We also use Paypal. My major issue is their internal dev team/processes seem broken. We got stuck in a 'verify your identity' loop for months. The business support person was great, patient and understanding. But no one could fix it. We'd pass the check then overnight it would revert and block transactions, sometimes multiple times a day. We setup a second payment processor as we should've much earlier. Eventually it was fixed without explanation or notice. Braintree is probably a lot better on this front but having the Paypal logo more prominently displayed has a lot of value for some customers who don't like the unfamiliar.
I've won 100% of the disputes where it was pretty clear the person wanted to just grab the content for free and then do a charge back. The problem is Stripe not blocking the real fraudulent transactions where a bad actor stole someones credit card and signed up with that. These are the ones where I've lost 100% of the time (for good reason since it was fraud). Stripe didn't prevent those from occurring where as PayPal has blocked every single fraudulent transaction before it took place and I didn't have to sign up for extra fees or lift a finger to get that protection.
To my understanding (and I may be wrong) with Braintree the customer would still see PayPal's branding if they check out via PayPal. They would see something like this: https://articles.braintreepayments.com/img/developers/pay-wi...
I don't recall paying extra for Radar and I definitely received an early warning from them, but after the transaction went through. It's apparently included on standard Australian pricing but costs an extra $0.08 per transaction if you're on a negotiated rate. Good to know.
I asked PayPal for their advice, and on that advice I keep email confirmation, IPs and timestamps of download, login, registration and payment IPs, billing address, etc. -- doesn't seem to help when I submit it all as evidence.
First I reach out to the person over email and kindly ask them why they disputed the charge with a number of things we can do as an alternative.
If they don't reply within a few days then I contest the dispute with piles of evidence that the user indeed signed up to my platform and downloaded / consumed the content.
Once I explain that I can simply refund them and it's quicker and easier, but they have to withdraw the dispute, it should happen.
If they actually stick to their story or go dark? I don't think I've heard many stories of Paypal siding with the business especially for digital goods.
Stripe has blocked multiple fraudulent transactions for me. PayPal has let multiple through which are clearly fraudulent just from me looking from my end. I recently had a case where a customer tried to pay with a stolen card on Stripe, got blocked with maximum risk score, so they created a PayPal account and used that. The payment went through, got hit with a chargeback and a fee a few weeks later. Product was automatically given - digital goods. PayPal refused to cover the costs and passed it through.
I've never had a dispute raised on Stripe. I've had multiple on PayPal.
Even in the rare instances where a chargeback or dispute happens PayPal has never failed to side with us or otherwise cover it under seller protection. And this is all done at the same fee levels as Stripe.
In the one exception the seller had proof of delivery, yet it was not possible to have been delivered that day because of a road closure. PayPal sided with the seller. A year later out of the blue, with no prior communication, the seller sends me a full refund and said the package was returned by the delivery company. No idea where it has been sitting for about a year before being returned.
You're probably referring to PayPal disputes, but PayPal also covers merchants from chargebacks (even if the chargebacks themselves are won by the buyer), when a physical product is shipped.
So it seems like they must eat a lot of the fees because in the case of the credit card dispute PayPal is eating the charge if they do Seller Protection.
Somehow they do all this while offering standard credit card rates, so I think they're heavily undervalued by startups.
https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+freeze+funds&oq=paypa...
Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved. It will probably be fine, of course, but I've seen it happen and personally, if I were in a high margin business, I'd stick to Stripe. Especially if you run a company where other people make money on your platform like an Etsy or similar.
I got a letter from the state comptroller saying that paypal had been trying to reach me and my money was about to revert to the state and call this number to get it.
So I called the number, and they ask me, "Do you want it in a check or in your paypal account?" Well that account has been frozen for years so I say, "Send me the check."
That was a few years ago now and I'm still waiting.
Fuck PayPal.
(Assuming that paypal reported the uncollected money correctly.)
THX-1138, eh?
I talk shit about it (and will continue to do so until the Sun grows cold or PayPal goes under, whichever comes first) because it's the only way to get them back for robbing me. The actual $200 mean almost nothing to them either, so I just rub my muddy boots on their couch from time to time.
"Fuck yo' couch Eddie Murphy" (head's up the n-word is in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJkhSUSnek )
We operate internally in USD - we sell in USD, we pay in USD, so we end up being shafted with not one, but two pointless FX conversions. And that's without going into minor stuff like the headaches with refunds done at rates, extra accounting overheads, etc.
And they're currency conversion fees are obscene if you want to withdraw USD to EUR (on the order of like ~4% iirc)
The most annoying thing is that US customers pay additional fees because we’re based in the UK, and our UK customers pay extra fees because we’re billing in dollars.
Stripe customer support very responsive, but they’ve told us the only way to fix it is to open a bank account in the US - which would mean we pay tax in the UK and US. We tried opening a USD bank account in the UK, but Stripe told us after we’d done it that they couldn’t send money to it. Maddening problem with an otherwise brilliant service.
check us out developer@routefusion.co, and feel free to email me at colton@routefusion.co if you have any questions!
We are an API for cross-border payments. Our customers are international payroll providers, credit card companies, neo-banks, and other types of companies who need to process X-border payments in their application.
If you were an e-commerce store, we could certainly help you re-patriate funds via our web app, but that’s not our focus.
Are you having issues re-patriating funds? Happy to help in anyway I can!
I have no idea what this means.
The problem is that you (and the marketing copy on your site) explain what you DO instead of which of the problems you might help me solve. Use-cases, in plain English.
Perhaps you have enough business already, so you don't really care about pitching passerbys, but if you do, then your pitch is unclear and confusing.
fwiw - re-patriating of funds would be when a company based in the UK for example, is doing business in the USA, and they are getting paid in the USA, in USD. Moving that money back home to the UK in GBP would be the re-patriation of those funds.
Looking at https://www.paypal.com/ca/for-you/fees It looks like the fees are exactly the same as Stripe, what am I missing ?
Can you elaborate ? Are you a charitable organization?
With PayPal, fees are: 3.7% + $0.30 USD
With Stripe, fees are: 2.9% + $0.30 CAD + 0.6% (international card charge) + 2.0% (currency conversion fee)
Source: I work at Stripe, but in addition to that, previously started a Canadian company using Stripe, and like you did mostly payments to US customers in USD. I had deposits directly into both a USD bank account held at a Canadian bank as well as a USD bank account held at a US bank, and did not pay the 2% conversion fee. I actually never received CAD directly at all.
More details: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts
But yes, other than certain exceptions such as this one, getting payouts in non-local currencies on Stripe is limited, and we're working on improving that.
(edit: This assumes you have expenses in USD, or a cheap way to convert USD to CAD, to avoid a ~2% fee from your bank on the conversion. Personally I've used Interactive Brokers which charges 0.002% for USD/CAD conversions.)
[0]https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payouts
Source: I work at Stripe
American banks also take forever to transfer payments, which drives me mad. There is this massive amount of money just in limbo, a sort of shush cash pile, which the banks make interest off of while the owners of the money fume waiting for permission to use their own money. Grr. /rant
No, it’s caused by the fact that I get a minimum of 2.625% cash back on all purchases, and actually 5.25% on all online and most of my other purchases with credit cards.
A few (maybe 5 or 6?) years back I suddenly stopped being able to add or withdraw money through PayPal, with a completely vague description. Multiple hours on support documents and attempting to contact support (which is a problem in itself) and the problem was not resolved. I wasn't that invested in buying what I was trying to buy, so I eventually gave up. I've tried again a few times over the years, with no success.
When I see PayPal on a site nowadays and either no other options or I don't trust them to process the card themselves, I just leave. If this is the sort of effect that could harm your business it may be worth it to pay for a payment processor that works for all your users.
I also have a $0.49 balance in PayPal which I can't withdraw. I don't care, but if it were a larger amount I probably would.
"This is digital migration in a very compressed period of time, for both businesses and customers," Collison adds. "My mom recently asked me if I'd heard of 'this Instacart thing.' Yeah mom, I have."
Certainly there will be some stickiness, but how much and for whom?
To state the obvious, some adoption will be permanent but others not much. Where that will happen and by how much is a diff question.
Example, will people go back to Starbucks or will they keep on making more coffee at home, maybe get an entry espresso machine?
Even Mao with his Hong weibings wasn’t able to stamp out the parts of Chinese culture he wanted to stamp out forever.
Right now a lot of people have no choice but to learn how to meet with Zoom, how to order with Instacart, how to communicate through Slack, ... And as they do, hopefully things are working out OK and they're building confidence in those technologies.
When the pandemic subsides, I don't see much reason for people to revert en masse.
Now we are trying to minimize going out at all. So we've been using instacart and shipt for over a month and it's a big time saver. So I expect we will continue to use them once we are in a more normal state.
So I expect lots of people will keep using them just because it saves time.
I think normal is going to be way out like 18 months at least and probably longer.
Even at that point we're probably going to be minimizing crowds and shopping in stores. And we're definitely going to be shopping less frequently and larger grocery orders.
This event will change how a large % of us lives and shops for a long time.
- Staying secure, reliable, and available for our existing customers. Some businesses in Stripe are seeing huge surges in demand and others are seeing major shortfalls. In either case, we want to make sure we can that we can be relied on to provide flawless service.
- Keeping up with the surge of new customers. A lot of businesses are migrating online and many of the platforms we serve are also seeing significant spikes in signups. So, we're investing a lot of effort in making sure that we can scale effectively there and remove all unnecessary friction. (There's a very active project working on cleaning up our docs and improving the integration experience, for example.)
- Adding support for business models that were previously limited because of bank/card network restrictions. We just launched support for telemedicine last week.
- Figuring out ways to help businesses by enabling access to government programs (e.g. the PPP program in the US). These programs usually haven't thought much about the somewhat unique characteristics of online businesses. We're trying to help government officials understand what internet businesses need. (And, per the comment elsewhere in this thread, we're rolling out our first PPP loans this week.)
Anecdotally, I couldn't get an interview, even though I had an offer from them in the past.
You can see our open roles at https://stripe.com/jobs/search?t=engineering (some corresponding to multiple people). They’re very real. We hire hundreds of engineers every year.
Do you want to clarify your phrasing or is that actually how you operate? :(
Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.
That said, it's less clear to me that the medium-term impact will be pro-incumbent or pro-large company. Big incumbents tend to be less adaptable and to benefit from large fixed cost barriers to entry (e.g. real estate). We're seeing a lot of nimble small businesses migrate to online business models far faster than the behemoths they used to struggle to compete against.
There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company.
I buy from small companies all the time and many of those that I do will likely survive because they provide better goods and services than any large company.
Doing away with large companies doesn't guarantee that this will end, though.
An example: while there are few large corporations providing physician services, the American Medical Association lobbies on behalf of the thousands of individual doctors and small private practices, often to the detriment of consumers anyway.
Sure there is - in terms of where the profit goes. The profit in a small business goes to the owner(s), who usually live somewhere in the local community, and in turn that money stays within the community to be spent on other businesses there.
When a Walmart comes along, the profits all move up the chain to a corporation that is nowhere nearby, effectively sucking the wealth out of small towns in exchange for slightly reduced costs thanks to efficient logistics.
The happy medium would be to find a way to have logistics as good as Walmart without having to actually be Walmart.
A business owner can have a successful business but they aren't really making tremendous profit, so how much of that money really remains in the local community.
The other aspect is also that real estate taxes need to be increased, which is the best way to ensure that funds inside a community stay there.
This way as more work moves remotely, through real estate taxes the local communities are still able to thrive.
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying, but it isn't so black and white.
Where have you been for the past decade? The economic impact is increasingly concentrated levels of wealth, where a handful of people are vacuuming up pretty much all of the wealth in America. The middle class (local business owners) is shrinking, the labour/wage worker class is growing, and the ultra-wealthy are getting richer.
> The other aspect is also that real estate taxes need to be increased
No, this also affects local businesses, who do not have the profit margins needed to survive. You need to find a way to limit the power big corporations have, while not hurting small/local business owners. A VAT tax is likely a much better solution to this problem.
Increasing real estate taxes is one way to ensure only big corporations with extensive logistics networks and high profit margins, that pay their laborers minimum wage would be able to survive. The point is to prioritize people over corporations, and your solution misses that completely.
And yet, the covid crisis demonstrates the opposite effect.
The cost advantage from Walmart is not just in logistics, it is specialization of labor, superior negotiating power against suppliers, and diversification of geographic risk. A small business will be less efficient and give up more profits to suppliers.
Additionally, because they fly under the radar and are less efficient, small businesses can be some of the most exploitative workplaces. Small businesses are also often exempted from pro-worker regulations, for example they do not have to provide healthcare to their employees. Several small businesses in cities I've lived in have waged years-long union-busting campaigns.
The point isn't that small businesses are worse than large ones, I just think they have a progressive halo which is often undeserved.
I guess you could say I’m privileged to be able to value more diverse offerings over the absolute lowest prices, but culture suffers when all you have are same 5 retailers and 20 restaurant chains in every town.
Also, economies of scale put small businesses at a disadvantage, even if their product isn’t inferior.
That could be restaurants that provide better quality food than the large chain restaurants. It could be a butchers that provide higher quality locally sourced meats than what I can get at Safeway and Walmart. It could be businesses making specialized gear that I use in my outdoor endeavors (Hyperlite Mountain Gear, Mountain Laurel Designs, Astral, Kokatat, Alpacka Raft, etc. etc.). It can be businesses that sell things the big businesses don't such as a specialty wine shop. There are tons of good small businesses that provide superior value. Selling the same products as Amazon and Walmart at a higher price with poorer customer service and worse return policy doesn't provide superior value.
A good business is one that provides superior value. Being large or small tells me nothing about the value being provided.
Everyone focusing on things like pricing power is missing the forest for the trees. If you don't have pricing power, the money is still leaving the community. Instead of going to the middleman that lives far away, it just goes to the manufacturers that live far away.
Furthermore, many of these large companies are public, which means everyone within any community has the opportunity of buying a piece of the company on the open market. The communities that buy the most of such large companies probably even keep more wealth in their community than the ones that don't. If enough local people buy shares, then it's possible that more profits flow into that particular community than flow out of that community.
With a small local retailer, it just means the money flows into the pocket of one person or one family in the community and no one else in the community can buy into that business and get the benefits of the value generated. This is what happens in places like Lake Chelan in Washington, where one family (the Campbells) has a stranglehold on politics and funnels everything to their businesses, which no one else locally is able to buy into.
Strong communities with a solid local economy are those that have many such small businesses that provide superior value. If your community does nothing that an Amazon or Walmart does, then there really isn't anything that's going to flow the balance of payments in your direction and the community will slowly die.
> Rather than mass production we need production of the masses.
Something like that.
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful
> First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and the popularisation of the concept of globalization. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
Overall I agree with your point. Many have shut their doors and I don't know if they'll reopen.
For rank and file workers, that may just build up the company, should get paid for their work. A company can be worth a lot, but still perform poorly.
If you have enough VC money coming in, you can purposely run a company unprofitable 'till for a long, long time - if you're goal is to simply undercut competition.
Patrick, I appreciate how supportive you are here so I hope you don't mind this turning into Q&A/support type of topic :D
1) Do you plan to lower the currency conversion fees for Singapore? We charge customers in USD but we are forced to convert to SGD and conversion fees adds up. On 99USD charge, with the current conversion, we get around 138 SGD but the net for us is 133 SGD because the processing fee is ~5.20SGD. That fee was lower before. There is no problem for us getting an extension of our account in USD currency so we could avoid unnecessary conversion USD->SGD fees.
2. Chargebacks. A real pain in the ass. I shared a post on IH about it. Basically there is no way for us to issue someone a refund if they are doing a chargeback. This is a real problem that is relatively easy to solve. PayPal does it - basically, if the customer submits dispute, PayPal first tries to contact the seller to voluntarily provide the refund and only if they refuse, the dispute is being reviewed. Why Stripe cannot work this way? That would save a lot of drama and stress involved running the business for both sides - you and us, your customers.
3. Pricing info. It's still very confusing on your website to understand what and how you charge for particular add-ons and whether we are grandfathered and have these add-on services included free of charge (since we have been with you since 2016).
Shoot me an email if you would like to chat more!
colton@routefusion.co developer.routefusion.co
$25b market cap, with 2019 full year net revenue being $538m, up 43% year-on-year.
https://www.adyen.com/investor-relations/news/h2-2019-financ...
Stripe:
Significantly less than Adyen, as many have reported.
----
Same business model, with Adyen having a higher operating margin.
This should be interesting to see how this plays out. Either Adyen will skyrocket in value, or Stripe will decrease in value.
seriously? like they've had A,B,C,D,E,F,G rounds of vc funding?
I just looked at your site and saw a book about Prince of Persia I hadn't seen before. I'm trying not to buy any more books because my stack is already too big but it's really tempting...
I'm just now dealing with canceling service with a traditional merchant account (I switched completely over to Stripe back in August), and the experience has been terrible and stupid.
Around 2003 or 2004, I was working on my first startup. I signed up for an authorize.net account through a merchant account called Capital Merchant Systems (later acquired by EVO Payments). At the time, the process required filling out a pile of paperwork, including writing an actual cover letter to get approved.
Things were fine until recent years, business for this particular service had slowly dropped to the point where it was no longer feasible to run through authorize.net. So I decided to finally make the switch over to Stripe (which I'd used for a number of years on another project).
Signing up for Stripe is so painlessly easy, straightforward, and friendly.
After switching my system over, I called and emailed my merchant account to cancel (this was in August). Then I called and emailed again in November. Then I called and emailed again in January.
All the while, they've been withdrawing from my checking account.
Then I emailed again in April, and filed reports with the BBB and FTC. Only then have I heard back from them, and they're claiming my January request is the first request.
So the short of it is, use Stripe. They are amazing, open, and transparent, their API is a joy to work with, and their dashboard is great. I wish Stripe was around 16 years ago when I first got started processing payments.
And DO NOT, under any circumstances, use EVO Payments. Cancelling with them is like cancelling a shitty gym membership - at the end of the day, you'll have to file complaints with every 3-letter organization you can think of, and file transaction disputes to cancel your account.
(Square and Shopify have 4.71B and 1.58B in revenue, respectively)
For example, if I return something to Best Buy, are they still paying that 2.9% fee to their CC processor?
as far as visa is concerned, they're both just transactions, regardless of the direction, and they want their fee.
I don't think this is changing any time soon. We don't even have public healthcare.
However the EU forced the payment services sector to cap charges for businesses so you're maybe paying 0.5% or less on a transaction not 2.5% and that's why you don't see amazing cashback card deals or big discounts for cash in the EU normally.
Here's a recent example from my life: About 10 days ago my partner sent $1000 to friends/family in another country and used the official channels that involves the nationalized bank in that country. It should have been there quickly, but took 10 days. There was no update the entire time and no phone number to call or other customer service channel to figure out what was happening. On day 3 or 4, a friend asked why she hadn't used this other private money transfer service that is known to be far more reliable, faster and with better customer service. With the government, there were still fees involved and the service was far less convenient/reliable.
Here's a fact of life: Nothing that requires the labor of other people will ever be free unless:
- the people providing the labor choose to do so and have the time to do so because they have some other means to support themselves; or
- someone voluntarily donates the money to fund both the creation of such a service and the maintenance of such a service in perpetuity.
- you steal money from someone else to pay for that labor.
Those are pretty much the only three ways that something requiring labor comes into being.
You can't just magically declare anything that requires human labor to be a basic human right and will it into being.
Of course this does not apply to everything. It's perfectly fine if not everyone has a private jet. It's not so perfectly fine if people are starving in the street.
Lending. Money sitting idle in accounts (moved into an account and not yet sent, or received, but not yet moved out) can be lent out to earn interest. That's how my bank can offer free transactions to all customers, both private and business.
Rights aren't granted, they have to be taken.
To the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas" (from the Simpsons):
The yellow gold of Texas
Is what I long to save.
I will not pay no taxes
If I hide it in a cave.I agree, and I'm not arguing with you, at least not directly.
I personally think of "rights" as a kind of useful fiction that gives a kind of psychological "leverage" in politics. I understand that a lot of people think that that term has some sort of concrete real-world referent, but I don't. I've never read anything intelligible on the matter, e.g. the US Constitution says God endowed us with them. It's poetic but legally meaningless AFAICT.
So I really don't want to argue about principles. It smacks of theology to me and I believe in the separation of Church and State.
Bitcoin, for better-or-worse, already lets people transfer wealth without asking anyone for permission for very reasonable cost. One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that.
But I think you mean more. I think you mean something like, constitutions should be amended to include EFT as a "basic human right", and that governments should provide the service too. Is that right?
Yes, of course. Rights are whatever we as a society decide they are. That's why I wrote, "should be considered a basic human right" rather than "is a basic human right."
> One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that.
The devil is very much in the details here, and reasonable people can disagree. IMHO bitcoin is dangerous. The anonymity and inability to roll back transactions is IMHO a bug, not a feature. It makes it too easy to produce irreversible bad outcomes through negligence or malice.
> But I think you mean more. I think you mean something like, constitutions should be amended to include EFT as a "basic human right", and that governments should provide the service too. Is that right?
More or less. I don't think it's so important what constitutions say. What matters more is what the societal consensus is. Money transfer should be a commodity. Its cost should be somewhere in the neighborhood of the marginal cost of production, which is one hell of a lot less than the 2.5% the credit card companies charge. And that cost should probably be born by society as a whole, just like with most other infrastructure.
First Data has a lower market cap than this with $9B in annual revenue and $1B in annual profit.
Also, this money is divided up among all the players. This includes the network (Visa, Mastercard, etc.), the Bank (every credit card has an issuing bank), and the acquirer (Stripe).
They can go after the PaymentTechs and Worldpays of the world but that is just a race to the bottom on processing fees. Another problem with going after those companies, they can easily drop the processing fees to near zero since PaymentTech is owned by Chase and Worldpay by Vantiv/FIS. Adyen is going to dominate the omnichannel retailers since their solution is best.
This seems to be a recurring pattern in the more innovative online payment services. GoCardless is similarly trying to shift how people pay for things online away from the fragile and unreliable card networks.
Unfortunately, at least for some of us, the problems these services are solving are becoming secondary. The biggest pain points now, as a business selling services online from the UK, tend to be about regulatory compliance issues that increasingly conflict with clean, user-friendly payment processes and about the increasing complexity of global VAT/sales tax rules (and the ever more hostile rhetoric combined with often unrealistic demands from many governments in connection with the same).
I'm looking at setting up a new business at the moment, and our initial assumption is that we won't be using services like Stripe and GoCardless at all any more, even though I've built modestly successful businesses with them in the past. We just don't have time for all of the compliance and tax hassle in every country in the world where someone might buy from us, and while Stripe's new samples and guides have helped with showing how to get their new PSD2-friendly API to work, they also serve to show how horrifically complicated the once-simple process of charging a card online is now becoming. In the near future, I suspect this will push many of us into using marketplace or merchant-of-record arrangements and just outsourcing the whole shebang to businesses large enough to deal with those issues properly, who will no doubt take a larger cut of the revenues in return.
You'd think governments would have been solving these problems at an international level decades ago, but many of them aren't even following the general OECD guidelines they've theoretically agreed. It's bizarre that in 2020, it's actually becoming harder for an honest business to sell a decent product or service to a genuine customer online.
But to make money you have to spend money.
If you don't raise any money at all, you'll be able to build a second factory after 8 years, a third factory after 4 years, and a fourth factory after another 2 years. At that point you're making $4M/year and no longer expanding. Hooray! After 14 years of putting all the profits into making new factories, you can enjoy watching the money flow in.
Now suppose you were able to convince investors to give you $24M to build three more factories immediately, in exchange for some percentage of the business. You're immediately making $4M/year, minus whatever percentage goes to your investors. If the percentage that the investors get is low enough, this has a higher net present value to you than the slow-and-steady approach described in the previous paragraph.
Now what if investors aren't convinced enough to give you $24M, but they will give you enough ($8M) to make one factory? Well, you could open that factory, show investors that you're making double the profits now, and maybe that'll convince them to invest more now that your business has proven itself. There may even be multiple rounds of this. The rationale is the same: by expanding your business faster, you expand your revenue faster.
Either way, would be great to connect -- kmoriarty@stripe.com
Most of our clients use Stripe for payments on our platform. They are connected via Stripe Connect. However a handful of them use other services from other providers as well also with Stripe Connect.
We are seeing web hook events not just for our own platform but also the other platforms too which obviously includes details about the transaction but also often with personally identifiable information such as name, email, address, telephone number.
Your support team acknowledged that they are aware of the issue. The response was:
"Because of how the design of the connected accounts are, any events from that connected account will be sent to all Platforms that the account is connected to. We do understand and see how this is a potential security/safety issue, and we have made note of this to our Connect team.
While we do not have any current plans to adjust this, we are going to discuss things with our Connect team to see if there is a way to we can make this better for our users."
I personally consider this a massive data leak because potentially sensitive information about customers is being shared to companies who have no right to access that information.
I really hope you can look into this.
Regards, Will
"Someone bought 1,000,000 shares of a company at a price of $20 in a secondary offering. Company's marketcap is now $36B"
Private equity market lingo is dumb. Many companies don't state the valuation after a round and the ones that do deliberately do it for clout. It is confusing and counterintuitive because people wonder why the "valuation is stretched" when literally just someone bought some shares, its not really news that someone bought shares at a high price. "Jonathan bought 1 share of Amazon for $2,000 for a valuation of 1.5 trillion" doesn't matter if this was a secondary market trade, or Amazon doing a 1 share secondary offering "raising $2000", it is a completely non news story, except in how the private equity world chooses to warp the language.
In private equity, the "rounds" have to be a higher valuation, and a "down round" is bad - an instant death knell and death spiral for the company solely because of how the PE world chooses to broadcast clout.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/04/08/w...
For PayPal, they are much larger, you could do the same. You will not beat them over night but you can easily find niches where a more tailored approach would benefit the businesses rather than the broad strokes a company of that size has to take.
One area to look at for both would be online sales. Neither do that well at all. Another area to consider would be embedded experiences that require micro transactions. Stripe and PayPal are all but wedded to the payment networks at this time.
Why should one business have to shoulder the struggles of another? Yes, there is potentially a moral obligation to your fellow man. But this is capitalism baby.
If stripe handed out a bazillion loans without any expectation they’d be paid back... what do you imagine would happen?
Genuine question... is the interest really the major issue with the loan they offered?
The amount of interest in the “slice of daily sales” is not that much (relatively speaking). That slice is just a loan repayment, which you would have to do whether it was interest free or not.
Maybe Stripe could do something like temporarily lower their fees or maybe reduce the up front fee, but I imagine that their current loan offer to you isn’t far from what you would get even if they had a net zero expected value from your loan.
Am I missing something?
YES! I did email them. Lets see, Fingers crossed. :-) Thank you.
I would love to use stripe because of DX/UX, but honestly as a SMB, can't really justify it.
They're worth how much!? Forgive me but how is this worth that much?
graph1: linear + exponential s curve
When you zoom out the first graph, the exponential part starts looking linear
graph2: linear + slightly less linear + exponential
Oh wait, it is an exponential curve right? D'oh
I work with non-profits in Canada. PayPal used to be omnipresent, but in the past 2-3 years, most of our clients dropped it. I never found any good data to back whether we should still support it or not. (payment method FOMO)