Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?
Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?
My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better value, and offer more things for the price - except most of the "value-adds" we didn't care about (their only interesting things was the Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page... which is a complete non-starter for a serious eCommerce operation).
Perhaps not a good fit - but paying a ton more per year in CC processing fees just because Stripe uses "AI!!!!" wasn't something we could swallow.
People don't switch processors often, so building out an integration once every 10 years isn't a big deal if you design your integration correctly.
That, and I assure you, your customers don't give a darn about which processor you use.
Does it? In my experience you can just use their Hosted Fields which are actually really great.
Even "hosted fields" is absurd (and by that I assume you mean an iFrame you embed), and would require redesigning significant portions of the checkout process.
That, coupled with their refusal to even match our existing rates, was really off-putting. The sales people made little effort to understand our business and pain points - they just wanted to talk about how great Stripe is and all the AI stuff they do.
Users of eCommerce platforms generally will be SAQ-A since they are not the ones controlling the system which handles CHD. This covers platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, 3dCart, Volusion, etc, where the platform itself must be PCI compliant on their own, separate from whatever PCI level you are compliant with.
If you self-host, such as Magento, XenCart or some custom implementation - then yes you will be SAQ-D.
Your sales team walked away from the negotiations after a while because we weren't willing to pay significantly more just to have the brand "Stripe" be part of our business. It really was a "but, but, we're Stripe! AI! Why don't you just agree to the terms? AI!!! Did we tell you about the AI!?!?!".
I suppose it was Stripe's loss in the end... and I imagine we're not the only company that had this experience.
I have the impression Stripe's "bread and butter" are small-time shops (partnered with Shopify where 99% of sites generate < $1MM annual), hobbyists, and similar smaller operations that either can't negotiate better rates due to low volume, or don't know they can negotiate better rates due to high volume. Nothing is wrong with that - it just means Stripe isn't a good fit for companies with significant volume.
I believe they've changed the name now, but we're using what used to be call PayPal Payments Pro, which is just a processor (customers stay on your checkout page, you build the checkout form, no PayPal account necessary for the customer, etc). We were using CyberSource when PayPal approached us for negotiations - they ultimately made an offer we couldn't refuse (based on volume) and made the switch. This CC Processor product from PayPal has none of the baggage or horror stories you hear from people using PayPal Express Checkout - it's almost like you're dealing with a completely different company.
Stuck with nowhere to go.
Not against improving margins, but customers that have walked hand in hand with Stripe for so long and seen them thru their early growing pains should definitely be grandfathered.
Grandfathering would be the cool thing to do.
> would be the cool thing to do.
I understand they are still using the same functionality they had at signup time, and are still on the same API version, so not taking advantage of new direct functionality.
Yes, of course there is a bunch of indirect functionality or magic behind the scenes, but from a company lifetime perspective, when you enter into an agreement with a service provider, you would expect a relatively constant delivery of services, at the agreed prices, especially if your needs have not changed.
There are many companies that upon adding new functionality or services, decide to grandfather. New direct functionality comes at new prices, even if you are inherently benefitting from the new stuff.
Three I can think of, Zendesk, Customer.io and Geckoboard grandfathered our plans.
When it is easy to switch providers, grandfathering is not that important, but if you're tightly integrated, which pretty much everyone doing volume on stripe is, then you're screwed. You can't leave.
Even if you negotiate custom pricing, there is a knock on the door one day saying, "new pricing in place. Take it or leave"
The day you decided to go with Stripe you started being hostage of them, but this is not a bad thing, this is business, you choose a partner, they are allowed to change the terms if the contract permit it.
People on HN always think they deserve to be treated better than others
I have noticed a significant attitude of, "I originally signed up for this product with 'x' cost and 'x' features, and you have zero right to change anything about that."
It seems like a basic contract negotiation process would ferret that out - I thought that was a business thing to do. I work in higher ed, and we absolutely have to have contracts for all third-party vendors; any changes are negotiated with the start of new contracts. If we can figure it out, surely startups can - we're not really all that good at efficiency.
1. Stripe
2. Braintree
3. Coinbase Commerce
4. GitHub Marketplace
- increased fees for non-US payments (3.9% + 30 cents)
- did not refund fees when you refund customers
If there was a compelling alternative that isn't PayPal we'd jump in a heartbeat
You're literally moving millions of dollars a year through your billing platform. That's not a little bit of money. That's a lot. Own it.
You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.
Nobody said it was a little bit of money? Where is this comment coming from?
I have no idea if it's a good point or not.
Yet everyone did before stripe.
Saying you are "held hostage" might be a bit of a dramatic way to phrase it, but for some companies a change like this actually makes a difference. Such is the life of relying on any third-party services though.
Also, pointing out "faults" is not helpful. It's unproductive conversation. Many companies are built upon third-party services that they are (probably falsely) under the impression will not change. It's not your "fault" if you decide to use AWS services and become deeply integrated and they increase their prices by 10% and you can no longer afford their services... It's no one's fault. It's just unfortunate and all you can do is try to work around it, or close the company.
This is the real problem.
From the sidelines, it's easy to dismiss an additional 0.5% overhead as trivial. After all, that's less than 1%, right?
But it's not so simple. That 0.5% comes out of the profit margin. If a company has 50% profit margins, losing that extra 0.5% isn't a big deal. However, if a company is operating on 10% margins, that 0.5% suddenly becomes an extra 5% overhead.
It's your fault if you chose lockin. If you don't want to talk about fault, fine, but then don't go on to talk about fault :)
You have to start somewhere. Unless you have been handed a substantial amount of starting money and baked "we need to be provider agnostic" into your company beliefs from the beginning, it's rarely an early priority. Becoming profitable is usually what comes first. Securing a stronger foundation for your platform comes over time.
> If you don't want to talk about fault, fine, but then don't go on to talk about fault :)
What is the point of saying this?
> What is the point of saying this?
Whatever criteria you used to justify asking this question probably also apply to it.
Exactly this. We started being Stripe customers after they bought some third party several years ago. While Stripe maintained the deal it was good for our business but recently they decided to end the deal we had (I don't blame them, it was a very sweet deal for us). Fortunately my startup always have had more than one provider and now we can calculate a "least cost routing" process, which will definitely move a lot of our volume outside of Stripe.
But it is just that, business. You should not trust any one provider with your business, not even AWS (i.e. not even at that level).
Data portability is a solved problem in this space - so there isn't a material risk of churn due to a migration like this.
We recently went through the process and it was very easy.
[1] - https://stripe.com/docs/security/data-migrations/exports
Here's my anecdote of a different situation but with some similarities, where we couldn't get the data portability we wanted.
A few years ago I asked our Direct Debit provider if we could migrate customer subscriptions from our old business entity to our newly incorporated company version of the exact same business.
The old business entity was to be wound up as a complete transfer to the new one, the trading name was identical (transferred along with trademarks), and we were happy to keep the same DD provider.
The answer we got was no, each customer would have to enter their bank details and agree to the same terms again. From the customer's point of view, they probably wouldn't even notice it was a different business, because in a real sense it wasn't.
We decided this would lead to significant churn in customer subscriptions, and we couldn't afford it. It would be cheaper to maintain and administer the old business entity, for no business purpose whatsoever, just the sole purpose of continuing to receive the DD subscriptions, and pay them immediately in full to the new business entity.
We're planning to migrate away from Stripe after this latest in a line of price increases.
We wanted to move ~300 credit card details from SagePay to Stripe. SagePay had a minimum admin fee of 2000GBP in order to do this, and no amount of negotiation could shift it.
If anyone's had a better deal from SagePay - let me know.