Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

33 pointsgfykvfyxgc70 comments

Say you’re running an online store, selling something digital or physical.

Is it practical to completely avoid the fees of payment processing companies like Stripe?

How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way.

In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant.

You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't add the right invoice number, for example).

PayPal or similar also have their fees.

Using crypto for payment is possible, but the wild swings in price means that this is a highly unstable option. There are fees there as well (0.5 USD - 1 USD), and the time to close a transaction is a lot (10 minutes, IIRC).

It is also making things like taxes a pain. And that is where you start to get into really "fascinating" territory.

A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc.

This cannot be understated enough. Accepting cryptocurrency may hit you with KYC requirements in your region, PayPal is frankly worse than Stripe, opening a merchant bank account just to process might not be worth it, and oh PCI-DSS audits will just kill your idea off the ground of processing credit card payments, not to mention the hassle of actually handling the fallout of card data leak.

If you're not in the US and will only process domestic transactions are are willing to skip acceptance of credit cards, you would want to look if your environment allows a much more simpler acceptance system (for example in Canada, parts of Europe and India a merchant bank account is relatively frictionless compared to American ones). Otherwise, read on.

Unless you're a very big company with dedicated accountants and backend logistics and in the fees collected by Stripe will be bigger than bringing it inhouse, it'll be much, much more expensive to be honest. Stripe probably is the least worst option right now since that you don't need to have a merchant bank account for example, which can be an headache.

However, if you want to minimise data collection at any cost, then probably only accept cash and cryptocurrencies (that is, if you run a node and not outsource it a la Stripe)?

I think this raises really great points - but I think there is one additional major question too which is "what scale are you dealing at?".

If you are handling billions of dollars in sales, then yes, rolling your own payment infrastructure will probably be worthwhile, but at that scale you will also be getting a very different commercial offer from the payment gateways anyway.

If you 'only' have a million dollars in sales, then there isn't going to be a payback here (but there may be a cheaper payment gateway than Stripe).

The fees to Visa and MasterCard can't be avoided - even Amazon is having a public commercial spat Visa over fees.

And 3) If you have a small number of transactions bank transfers should work just fine.

>A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc.

I signed up for Stripe thinking it was the case but it turns out they don't handle VAT and taxes and I have to find something else (looking into Paddle and I would be grateful for suggestions and ideas). How are people here dealing with VAT and taxes for their SaaS in 2021. Company is in France, Europe. Clients could be anywhere.

I wanted a one stop shop and thought Stripe did that.

I think Stripe does now have a tax product. Not sure what the features/limitations are but it seems to be saying it handles VAT for you. Can't offer anything deeper than that as I haven't used it but thought I'd mention in case it was helpful!

https://stripe.com/tax

Thank you. I had recently looked at that quickly but I'll be more thorough soon.

If you want a service that does all of the VAT admin on sales, including reporting and remittance to government authorities in all relevant jurisdictions, you might want a "merchant of record" service. You mentioned Paddle, who seem to be popular and getting positive reviews among my network, though they aren't the only MoR available now.

Given how much pain governments are increasingly inflicting in this area, and the EU more than most, I expect that the market for these services will grow and using a merchant of record will become the dominant mechanism for accepting online payments, at least for smaller online businesses with significant international or inter-state sales. (I'm not sure this will be a good thing for various other reasons but it's what I expect to happen if current trends continue.)

The tax products offered by Stripe and a few specialist providers seem to offer little more than tracking some VAT rates and doing some simple calculations. I don't understand who the target market is supposed to be for these services today. Anyone with the resources to handle reporting and remittance properly everywhere surely doesn't need to pay the extra fees just for a bit of tracking and arithmetic. Anyone who doesn't have those resources might prefer to outsource everything (including responsibility for compliance) to specialists who offer a comprehensive service.

>If you want a service that does all of the VAT admin on sales, including reporting and remittance to government authorities in all relevant jurisdictions, you might want a "merchant of record" service. You mentioned Paddle, who seem to be popular and getting positive reviews among my network, though they aren't the only MoR available now.

That was my understanding after becoming aware of this, and Paddle seems to be popping up a lot.

>using a merchant of record will become the dominant mechanism for accepting online payments, at least for smaller online businesses with significant international or inter-state sales.

That's our case. It wasn't much of a problem for our consulting activities (mainly mid six-figure contracts with a few clients, mainly in Europe, often repeat business). However, we launched a product and it's surprisingly more straightforward to charge someone 250k than to charge many a few hundred bucks here and there. At least for now. VAT on a large invoice, bank-to-bank and accounting firm, it's just part of business. VAT on SaaS for a few hundred euros via a credit card? Something else, but I digress. We've been learning.

>The tax products offered by Stripe and a few specialist providers seem to offer little more than tracking some VAT rates and doing some simple calculations. I don't understand who the target market is supposed to be for these services today.

Again, you hit the nail on the head as to our situation. I had looked at Stripe "Tax" before, but I couldn't understand it really: it appeared like a landing page with a calculator behind, but that is unfair because I haven't looked at it closely and haven't tried it yet. The impression was that it was less fully-fledged than Paddle, but I'm more than willing to be wrong because it would mean that I'll only use Stripe for everything (for now, then I'll handle the problem of the eventuality of them shutting down our account or something like that and figure out contingencies / payment hot-swapping).

>Anyone who doesn't have those resources might prefer to outsource everything (including responsibility for compliance) to specialists who offer a comprehensive service.

That's my case. If you have a few contracts per year for large amounts, I can do that easily: we use an accounting firm, simple invoices, bank transfers, everything is neat. But for a large number of small amounts, I want to buy the option of not doing accounting.

That desire is so deep, that it even influenced our product. It's a machine learning platform that lets people train, track, package, deploy, and monitor machine learning on their Kubernetes clusters.[0]

Why their Kubernetes clusters? Because it's a good way to charge a flat rate instead of counting beans: if we provide compute, we'll have to meter it, or charge a flat rate and play the large numbers game (many using it less subsidize those who over use it). We wanted to have nothing to do with that metered billing, especially on infrastructure costs, and we just let users do things on their own clusters and data.

- [0]: https://iko.ai

I suspect many of us are in a similar situation today. It looks like my own business interests have followed a similar pattern to yours: some client work where you probably have a small number of relatively large invoices to account for, some self-service B2C with subscriptions of much smaller amounts. For the subscriptions the pain of updating our payments infrastructure so often for new payment service APIs and regulatory requirements has been considerable in recent years.

When I was working on a pre-launch SaaS for a different business recently only the new generation of payment services where we could outsource everything were being seriously considered. My existing companies basically treat the split responsibility model used by PayPal, Stripe and similar services as legacy technology now and our plan is to phase it out completely when the opportunity arises. Everything will be either direct funds transfers from a client's bank account to ours, for high value clients who are worth the effort, or completely outsourced, which means again we just see one large transaction from time to time that is easy to account for.

>* or completely outsourced, which means again we just see one large transaction from time to time that is easy to account for.*

Which service are you currently using to achieve this, and could you say more about your experience with them?

My contact information is in my profile if you would rather address this via email.

We aren't using such a service yet at any of the established businesses I work with but the intent is to shift at the earliest reasonable opportunity.

Migrating is not trivial if you have an existing customer base who are already signed up via other payment service providers. A merchant of record will typically need all end customers to sign up personally and thereby enter into a sale contract with them and not with you. That means you can't just transfer existing payment details and authorisations the way you can between different PSPs processing card payments for you. And if you don't migrate everyone, you still have to handle all the relevant tax admin anyway and lose much of the benefit of working with a MoR.

So the new SaaS I was working on was planning to use a MoR from the start, while the established B2C business will probably wait for convenient opportunities like launching new products and retiring old ones to make the shift to minimise churn.

I don't know if a final decision has been made about which service the new SaaS will use. Among my personal network Paddle has had positive feedback and I think that's probably what that business will end up going with. I know there were some concerns about the legal arrangements and Paddle's terms and I don't know if they've been addressed yet.

>So the new SaaS I was working on was planning to use a MoR from the start

We're here. Registrations are not open yet and new users will be onboarded through an accounting/revenue service friendly pipeline, and ping the lawyers and accouning firm to look into it.

I wonder how people here launch SaaS products directly with a "just use Stripe" and "just launch" attitude and don't seem to think about that. Is there something I'm missing? Do they just assume that the revenue generated is so low that they're not on the radar of their revenue services and "just launch"? Surely I'm missing something and they're doing something behind the scenes to handle that.

They also don't seem to mention they're using a limited liability company (SARL, SAS, LTD, LLC) and I'd assume they're operating as a Sole Proprietor / Natural Entity / Natural Person / Personne Physique, which is way risky in my opinion in terms of liability. That or the services they're providing are inconsequential and there is no risk because the stakes are low (SaaS with no sensitive data and users who wouldn't mind a breach or something). Again, I'm propably missing something.

Some threads on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/jms7qz/how_to_correct...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/bjskp2/vat_in_saas_lo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/cknr04/how_do_you_han...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/kso2i7/vat_moss/

In India we have UPI by government no fees.

It is a new way of payments that removes need for middleman and government even has a official app ( BHIM App ) for it and most importantly it is a protocol so anyone can use it without third parties ( private companies )involved.

It now also supports subscriptions.

UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct

Read more at: 1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface 2. UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/87474515.cms 3. Search Google for "UPI in India"

That's awesome. Sounds a lot like Brazil's Pix, which I saw some people in this website say would be a detriment to the "free market" and shouldn't exist. Lol.

lol

Also it is supported by all payment apps including PayTm, PhonePe, and Google Pay India.

You can't avoid fees if you're accepting card payments. One way or another you will be relying on multiple specialist services to access the card networks and they are each going to take a cut.

Cards are a broken and expensive payment method that needs to go away, and in some parts of the world that is already starting to happen, but it really depends on where your sales are. If you are aiming for customers in the US you're probably stuck with cards for now because it's what people and businesses expect to use.

However if you're selling to somewhere like Europe you might get a much better deal with alternative payment methods like SEPA and the national schemes. There will still be fees and risks but they can be much lower than you'll ever get with card payments.

Whichever payment method(s) you decide to accept you will still have to deal with the admin around taxes that has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. An alternative strategy of outsourcing everything to a specialist that handles both payment processing and tax admin is becoming increasingly attractive. As always if you're running a small business you might want to concentrate on whatever products or service you offer and outsource as much of the rest as you can. In this case the question isn't about how to avoid fees, because obviously you can't, but whether the amount you save is worth the fees you spend, which it easily could be.

In my country (Montenegro), at least one logistic company supports cash on delivery for physical goods shipped within the country. Specifically, a buyer orders something, a seller ships the package, the logistic company delivers package + papers, takes cash + buyer’s signature, pays the seller.

I never sold things that way, but I bought stuff couple of times paying cash.

It's a barrier for consumers though, you have to be home when the package comes in or go to a delivery point.

US Centric answer:

If you're looking to accept card payments, then no. Both credit and debit cards have interchange fees[0] that are unavoidable. Strong negotiation with a payment provider can land you on an "interchange plus"[1] type fee schedule, which means that they pass through their costs to process the transaction and add some small fixed amount. Note that card interchange fees can range from essentially 0% (debit cards) to >2% fees baked into them. Rewards cards can reach 2.5%+ -- merchants pay for rewards on these cards and eventually pass the cost onto everyone else in the form of higher prices.

Now you could look at using something like ACH to automate bank debits. On paper, this could be as cheap as $0.10/txn. However, there's a litany of new issues to worry about. ACH payments take days to clear. The information needed to debit someone is printed on checks and given out, so now you've got a new authorization problem. People usually solve this with microdeposits or something like Plaid -- you're looking at more time and friction or more cost. People are not trained as well as with cards to punch their bank details into every other website.

Crypto adds a bunch of friction for unsavvy users, has no dispute flow (though I guess that's to your benefit as a merchant), and can have pretty variable costs.

Edit: at the end of the day, checkout completion rate is often more impactful than the fees. Other advice: 1) Try to negotiate with providers. You may not have sufficient leverage until you reach some scale, but it doesn't hurt to ask respectfully. 2) If you plan to grow your business for a long time: create local payments abstractions that make it easier to switch providers or support multiple providers later. Everybody has outages and this increases your negotiating leverage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee [1] Depending on the card distribution of your users, "interchange plus" can be more costly than a fixed plan.

You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening.

It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic.

Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.

Stripe and any number of the new fintech companies make card payments an absolute pleasure compared with the drama of getting merchant accounts, leasing a PDQ etc.

We run an SME (a boarding kennel, so nothing exactly cutting edge) and Square costs us 1.75% for cardholder present transactions. No minimum charge, cash is in the next working day, they do all the compliance so provided I don't do anything mental like taking pictures of payment cards, I'm sorted.

Obviously there's a higher cost for online processing and you could probably bring down the percentage cost if you shop around, but the ease of entry for card payments these days is absolutely astonishing.

The biggest problem with crypto is that you, as a business owner, want to make it as easy as possible for people to give you their money and crypto is a massive frction unless you're marketing to the tiny subset of people using it as a currency rather than a value store. It'd be a bit like accepting gold over the counter.

Doesn't Bitcoin have transaction fees ?

It does, but in the not so distant future most smaller transactions will be on its 2nd layer wallets (lightning). Close to no fees and close to instant. Its steadily growing.

Smaller transaction fees are always in the future with crypto. It was a design goal in the beginning and still hasn't happened in 12 years (age of Bitcoin network).

It was the case with Bitcoin until the last couple of years.

Yes, make your customers mail you a check or cash /s

In the UK if you really didn’t want to use a processor you could ask people to bank transfer you cash (free for both parties with Faster Payments) or send cheques, although most banks are phasing them out. There are definitely web stores which have this as an option and I’ve seen it in NZ too. The downside is manual labour and a transfer speed of O(minutes).

I used to help run a summer camp in Europe and we always took payment via direct transfer. None of us had the experience to write an e-commerce solution and we didn’t have the budget to buy one. Nowadays I guess we could use Stripe, but it’s still simpler to give people account details to pay into and to tell us when they sent it. We don’t have the numbers to justify anything complex either. Only recently we started accepting donations via PayPal and even then only because it’s very easy to generate the code for the button.

I was somewhat joking but my company takes checks too - some clients can only pay via check or wire with PO. But we insist on annual subscription simply because processing checks on monthly will be too much overhead not to mention delays.

There is something called a merchant account that might be suitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account. I'm sure there are some fees associated with it but you should look into it and see if it will fit your use cases.

If all your customers are local to your own country then yes you can engage a merchant e-commerce solution usually provided by a local major bank.

These were popular before Stripe arose.

You can save fees BUT the application process is often much more manual and long. Also don’t expect add-ons like having a good API or strong reporting or analytics.

We had such an account before Stripe and Braintree were in existence. The rates weren't significantly better than what Stripe or Braintree offered, which is why we switched. I assume that's still the case...?

Here’s an example of such in Australia with one of our “Big 4” banks.

https://www.payway.com.au

The pricing is competitive as the currently charge a flat monthly fee which comes up much cheaper than stripe.

I know as I’m integrating stripe into the new member site im building for our client and they’ve come back saying the old option is much cheaper.

AUD $300-400/month flat fee from the top of my head.

It’s missing many of stripes features though as I said earlier, which I’m now having to try to sell the client on as the benefit of additional automation and reporting coming at additional cost.

Stripe is not straight up cheaper in this case.

Don’t crypto exchanges use payment processors to transfer cash to bank account? I’m unsure about it though.

Likely only option is pickup and delivery with cash payment or keep crypto only never cash out. I don’t think the latter is convenient though.

The exchanges I've dealt with do not allow credit cards. I usually end up doing ACH transfers.

Add in-store pickups and accept cash payments.

But applicable for most countries outside of India, but UPI has no MDR.

But it does have a 60k inr daily limit.

crypto, debit, ACH (and RTGS equivalents in local countries like UPI in India and PIX in Brazil)

Handle payments yourself. And unless you have massive sales, those fees are cheaper and easier to maintain

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto.

Easy weekend project.

That's great if you don't plan to sell anything.

Good thing crypto exchanges don't charge fees.

That's not doable in practise.

- You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular.

- Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.

There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

> Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

Not sure what exchange you're using, but 0.1% on market trades is pretty common. That's very low compared to most fees.

You are misunderstanding the op.

He wants a payment processor for merchants, eg. bitpay.

1% transaction fee

Exchanges then have a:

- 0,1 % withdrawal fee

- Unknown/hidden? currency conversion fee. I would think there is a fee here, but i didn't find it documented.

Additionally, exchanges like Binance are banned in many places ( because of tether fraud). Coinbase would be one of the only exchanges to consider as a business in eg. The US.

And this has all been solved with the USDC stablecoin sitting on cryptocurrencies like Stellar. Just use that.

Job done.

Downvoters: So you are saying businesses can't use it?

USDC != USD.

Pegged to it doesn't mean it's the same.

While USDC is backed by Coinbase and more trustworthy than Tether. A lot of it is still going to uncharted territory.

> USDC != USD

Never said that. I'm only saying businesses can use it.

This is you from [0]:

> That's not doable in practise.

So a business cannot use USDC on some cryptocurrency like Stellar today then? [1]

So the concerns of high transaction fees, unstable price fluctuations and slow transfers which are all the properties of using payments with Bitcoin are somehow not solved because of USDC and it being built on cryptocurrencies like Stellar?

   are you sure?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735980

[1] https://ir.moneygram.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

Will this fare better than their ripple partnership where the SEC intervened?

Still, this doesn't address the fact that the op will lose a lot of business with solely crypto.

Therefore, it isn't an answer to his question. So it's not doable in practise.

Except if you want to lose a lot of money if you solely accept crypto.

This has all happened before in 2017. And shortly after crypto was removed as payment option almost everywhere.

Nothing fundamentally has changed since 2017. If so, what?

> Will this fare better than their ripple partnership where the SEC intervened?

Why not ask MoneyGram? Maybe they can give you a better answer than I or anyone else here could.

> Still, this doesn't address the fact that the op will lose a lot of business with solely crypto.

Solely? I don't think that is what you said originally, was it? [0]

From [0]

   > That's not doable in practise.

   > - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular.

   > - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

   > Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.

   > There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

It seems that you have decided to change your argument to 'solely' as soon as you saw my comment disproving your nonsense (with examples) and now you have started splitting hairs to present an illusion that businesses cannot use or accept cryptocurrencies. (and survive)

So OpenSea / Rarible / Dent Wireless are not businesses only accepting cryptocurrencies then?

> This has all happened before in 2017. And shortly after crypto was removed add payment option almost everywhere.

> Nothing fundamentally has changed since 2017. If so, what?

Right so it will happen again in 2021, 2022 then?

So in 2021, MoonPay, BitPay, Coinbase Commerce and Circle.com enabled businesses do not allow their customers like VISA, AMC and Shopify to accept cryptocurrencies and stablecoins like USDC?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735980

OpenSea is not products. Buyers think they will earn money from it and are prepared to put their HODL coin in it to earn more. It's one big piramid scheme.

Rarible is similar. It's not comparable to e-commerce. NFT's in it's current state is literally the perfect product for HOLD'ers if you think about it.

As said before, this all happened in the past. Woocommerce, Steam, Amazon, Stripe, ... All added it and removed it. Only square kept it.

The current hype is just the same that started with failing business trying to jump in it ( eg. Kodak and KodakCoin). Visa and others do want to protect themselves. But even Stripe currently started again a team for crypto with 5 person while they anandoned it in the past. Nothing says it will be important, it's a matter of "what if", just like in 2017.

Either way, this topic is about lowering transaction fees.

Changing to crypto would lose a lot of business. As such, the "patent answer" here is not doable for a business.

What's so hard to understand? You're not going to switch a business to a payment option that only represents 2% of possible transactions.

There's currently a lot of FUD. But it's all going away when BTC drops again.

It only took a pandemic previous time to reverse Bitcoin from a multi-year decline.

> OpenSea is not products... Rarible is similar. It's not comparable to e-commerce.

So OpenSea and Rarible don't qualify as 'e-commerce' because they sell 'NFTs' and domain-names are not products bought and sold on online marketplaces? You are splitting hairs once again.

> As said before, this all happened in the past. Woocommerce, Steam, Amazon, Stripe, ... All added it and removed it. Only square kept it.

First of all, we are in late-2021. Before I ask you to find citations for the reasons behind those removals, all these cases have cited towards the properties of Bitcoin payments and its unsuitability for that purpose, which is my whole point for businesses to use USDC on other cryptocurrencies like Stellar if they were to accept cryptocurrency payments; hence MoneyGram. We are not stuck in 2017 or whatever year you are trapped in.

> Either way, this topic is about lowering transaction fees.

So from "lowering transaction fees" to someone saying "Take payment in crypto" to you saying "That's not doable in practise" and me replying "USDC stablecoin sitting on cryptocurrencies like Stellar" and it ends up with you in denial, moving goal posts, splitting hairs until you now want to go back to "lowering transaction fees" which I already answered?

Where did I mention in my original comment to use Bitcoin for payments? It seems that it is only you having a very hard time ignoring Bitcoin, Look at this constant rambling from you:

   > There's currently a lot of FUD. But it's all going away when BTC drops again.

   > It only took a pandemic previous time to reverse Bitcoin from a multi-year decline.

What has Bitcoin got to do with USDC on many other cryptocurrencies as a suitable payment option with less fees? Your rambling here is completely irrelevant to that, regardless if Bitcoin goes up or down.

Either way, my answer already has addressed the topic and your previous 'claims' regardless of you being unable to cite your claims or stay on topic. Your whole comment sounds more of a complaint about cryptocurrencies and NFTs than a substantiative argument at this point. Maybe that is what has changed here.

When are you going to realise that your complaint is going round in circles?

Let's simplify it, to explain what "not doable in practice means":

On a normal site, how many % of visitors do you think will/can pay with USDC on stellar?

The example purchase is a computer screen worth 250$, found on a new e-commerce shop ( = you didn't have any purchases yet there)

Note: Most people don't have crypto.

So some basis for estimates:

Let's say that 16 % of Americans have ever bought crypto. Let's be positive and say that halve of them are willing to use it for a purchase instead of considering it as an investment. So 8% - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/11/16-of-ameri... .

Spread of the holdings are taken from an article:

> And it’s true that it is by far the most popular cryptocurrency with 66.7% of crypto investors owning Bitcoin. However, other crypto currencies are catching up with 28.6% of crypto investors holding the popular “memecoin” Dogecoin and 23.9% of investors holding Ethereum.

https://www.finder.com/how-many-people-own-cryptocurrency

A raw guess is fine ofc.

My guess: 0.001% of visitors. I'll explain why after your guess.

( It's possible that i missed something. I don't do these guesses often and I'm not exactly sure how many of those can pay with USDC on stellar even, but that shouldn't matter for the estimate)

You already explained about what you 'really' meant by 'That's not doable in practise'. No need to change it again or repeat yourself before I commented. Let me remind you before you forget again:

   - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular.

   - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

   Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.

   There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

You did not say 'solely' until I commented, did you? Even after that, I gave examples of crypto-only businesses. Once again, you attempted to change and shift the goal-posts because you knew those examples were true.

Throughout this whole thread. You are saying to everyone here, I cannot open a Shopify / WooCommerce account right now and accept USDC on whatever cryptocurrency like Stellar and accept payments, worldwide and not just in the US or with Bitcoin which your entire comment(s) are assuming.

Have I just proven and caught you changing your complaints once again about 'what you really meant' in [0], since you knew how incorrect you were, rushing to comment and still avoiding all of my questions?

It is evident that you are finding it harder and harder to cope and ignore cryptocurrencies in general and have to resort to changing definitions, meanings, etc to continue to hold up your complaints.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735980

Solely is because the op wants lower transactions. Giving an answer that would be applicable for 0,01% or less of the cases is just a useless answer.

The OP is not a crypto only business.

You're examples are similar to crypto investments, which is almost the only thing people would spend their crypto on.

It's not shifting when showing that you're answer would not even be applicable to 0,1% of his customers.

It's actually showing that your answer was useless in the first place.

You think/suggest 'USDC on stellar' even matters, i don't. They all have the same fundamental mistakes.

And it's not solely:

> high transaction fees, unstable price fluctuations and slow transfers

But please give me a realistic estimate for how many people your answer would be useful for the op.

Just a reminder in case you have forgotten what the OP said:

   >> Say you’re running an online store, selling something digital or physical.

   >> Is it practical to completely avoid the fees of payment processing companies like Stripe?

You:

   > You're examples are similar to crypto investments, which is almost the only thing people would spend their crypto on.

And how does that not count? Because you think it is for 'crypto investments', which you don't like? So..

..buying a blockchain domain name on OpenSea, Rarible for low fees is 'not practical' then? So I can't make my own marketplace using Shopify's NFT store then? Nor does any of that qualify as 'selling something digital' either in regards to the OP.

So Shopify is not 'e-commerce' because they allow you do sell NFTs?

So buying limited edition NFT shoes from an online store doesn't count either and they are not 'products'? [0]

Given that, is that why you knowingly edited and deleted your comment about the extremely narrow existence of an popular e-commerce business that solely accepts cryptocurrencies for physical products except for the dark web to make a fallacious point that cryptocurrencies are not ever 'practical' for avoiding 'expensive transaction fees' because 'ecoms added support and removed that functionality again' and that means 'There's no interest for buying things' using cryptocurrencies?

At the end of this day, week, month and year, these companies have still have not given up on it, Stripe included. Maybe you should desperately ask how OpenSea, Rarible, Shopify, Circle.com etc are still able to do this, since you are having a very difficult time in ignoring it whenever another user asks a crypto-related question on Ask HN.

[0] https://rtfkt.com/home

Oh no, the most popular product to pay with crypto is gift cards. Which is also popular with fraud.

There's literally no sense in buying anything with crypto when you have to give up the protection that you have as a consumer : chargebacks.

You are ignoring why eg. PayPal became popular: 180 days chargeback.

It's also the supplier who pays the transaction fee. The regular consumer doesn't care anything about paying anything with crypto..

I can ask 1000 people here that i meet and no one will know about USDC on stellar. That won't change either.

You should ask HN if there is any business owner that cares, lol.

> There's literally no sense in buying anything with crypto when you have to give up the protection that you have as a consumer : chargebacks.

This is the same 'protection' that is open to abuse by users through chargeback fraud or 'friendly fraud' on both Stripe and PayPal in which the merchants will get chargeback fees and their accounts getting closed with tons of fraudulent chargebacks by users, having to fight fraudulent disputes and waiting months for the money to be unlocked by Stripe or PayPal.

> I can ask 1000 people here that i meet and no one will know about USDC on stellar. That won't change either.

This is the problem. Here. on HN. Even when they still care to continue to ask more cryptocurrency questions. Like yourself.

Were you the same person that asked about whether if users on HN knew about cryptocurrencies in 2011? Or if you were to ask a generation born in 1910 if they know about how to use the world wide web in 1990?

This is exactly the same thing here. You and many others have made it clear that you won't use it. The next generation certainly will. Perhaps this is why several HNers are somewhat out of touch of recent trends these days.

> You should ask HN if there is any business owner that cares, lol.

I don't need to, the interest speaks for itself. For example on the front page of HN 31st of December 2021:

   Decent (YC W22) Is Hiring a Senior Full Stack Web3 Engineer

You are going to see more of this, like it or not. Are you ready to move the goal posts once again?

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/decent/jobs/gtwlg2C-se...

Friendly fraud can be faught. Both person's are known to the payment processor. You are still ignoring that it's the customer who decides how to pay. That's why a vendor won't pick crypto when the goal is selling products as in e-commerce.

Moving goal posts?

And you're talking about jobs in fan/artist investing now?

Honestly, i think that could have a chance. Same as Blockchain for voting rights for soccer clubs.

I already said that's possible and it's not related to the topic at hand:

> You're examples are similar to crypto investments, which is almost the only thing people would spend their crypto on.

But if you think any of both are even remotely related to the OP's post, than that's just idiotic.

> Friendly fraud can be faught. Both person's are known to the payment processor. You are still ignoring that it's the customer who decides how to pay.

The merchant is highly likely going to lose more money towards fighting friendly fraud on top of the chargeback fees regardless if the customer knowingly paid for the service, product or not or if both are known to the payment processor. That is irrelevant since it is the bank who decides who wins the dispute and the payment processor sides with them, even when the bank cannot determine if the chargeback is fraudulent or not.

> That's why a vendor won't pick crypto when the goal is selling products as in e-commerce.

So you mean 'running an online store, selling something digital or physical' as in e-commerce?

Didn't stop 'this vendor' from selling limited edition shoes to its customers. [0] nor did it stop this vendor either [1]. Once again, OpenSea, Rarible, etc selling NFTs like domain names, etc. Nor did it stop merchants using Coinbase commerce.

Since you keep forgetting, do I need to repeat the same examples again?

> And you're talking about jobs in fan/artist investing now?

This is you:

>> You should ask HN if there is any business owner that cares, lol.

It seems you forgot already? It was only because YOU asked here on HN for 'any' business owner. I didn't need to ask given this one seems to care.

> But if you think any of both are even remotely related to the OP's post, than that's just idiotic.

So '...running an online store, selling something digital or physical' is not what the OP said? Neither it being related to 'e-commerce' via buying and selling NFTs, domain names, shoes and clothes? That is idiotic because it involves cryptocurrencies, especially those that have low fees?

It is clear that you are still having a hard time accepting that a new generation of merchants and customers are accepting and using cryptocurrencies for payments 'globally' rather than you sitting there saying 'Nothing fundamentally has changed since 2017' or 'Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.' and 'But it's all going away when BTC drops again.'.

[0] https://rtfkt.com/home

[1] https://pacsun.com

Friendly fraud is allowed to sue in court. The beauty of know your customer.

https://www.pacsun.com/ accepts regular payments options, PayPal and also has BitPay. What's the proof? What's your point?

You have a breakdown of revenue per payment option?

https://rtfkt.com/ became a useless site? 2 forging events 6 months ago? Acqui hire for their AR experience? Who knows.

No take-over price is included. It really says nothing on it's own. They sold virtual sneakers for 10 k. $ per pop, with a total of 621 pairs. Sure, that's 'normal e-commerce', even the price on it's own is 1910 times the median crypto wallet in the US. And to be honest, that's a pretty low sales volume.

I think I have plenty of e-commerce experience ;). The % of crypto interest for selling/buying goods is neglectable to zero for online shops.

The median amount of money in crypto in the US is 191 $. So "the new generation" you're talking about is really poor or just using it as a shot to the moon. Whatever you think is appropriate.

Facts:

Here a breakdown from square, the only one that left crypto as payment option for a long term and enabling crypto trading, so should even be skewing stats in crypto & square's favor: https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/13/heres-how-much-squ...

https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2021/united-wholesale-...

> “There was not enough demand at the end of the day to really push the envelope too hard,”

> Although people indicated support for crypto and “said it was cool,” it wasn’t a decision-making factor, Ishbia added.

And please. If you want to refer articles, refer articles where crypto payments were used and researched. Not a opinionated user survey under existing coin holders like: https://cointelegraph.com/news/new-study-reveals-high-demand...

Research that almost no one uses their crypto's: https://archive.is/e5cua ( 2019 ) - if you want to defy this. Just give me newer research, i couldn't find any.

Latest report i could find for Coinbase Commerce ( 2020 ): 200 million $ in processed transactions in 2 years.

https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2020/03/159450-coinbase-com...

> Friendly fraud is allowed to sue in court. The beauty of know your customer.

So cryptocurrency merchants like Coinbase Commerce, BitPay have no KYC checks either?

> What's the proof? What's your point?

Forgotten?

>>> Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.

>> That's why a vendor won't pick crypto when the goal is selling products as in e-commerce.

So Pacsun is not e-commerce and they are not accepting cryptocurrencies? Why have they (and many others) added it then, even after 2017?

> became a useless site?...

Useless to who? Nike? So the interest is not there and it is still not 'e-commerce' because it isn't 'normal' e-commerce somehow? Oh dear. Maybe Ebay in 1995 is not normal 'e-commerce' because of the purchase price of the bids of limited edition goods.

> I think I have plenty of e-commerce experience ;)

If you did, you wouldn't need to try denying and narrowing your complaints or making absolute comments of 'what you really meant' because someone said use Bitcoin Cash? After every example given, Why change and continue to narrow the definitions of 'e-commerce' in the first place? Then make an absurd correlation between the price of Bitcoin in 2017 vs the price of a stablecoin in which that already addressed your outdated complaints.

Is that why you continue to deny the existence of cryptocurrency payments after 2017 by 'never looking back' but only reading single datapoints and headlines you agree with?

> And please. If you want to refer articles, refer articles where crypto payments were used and researched.

And why would I use that source if the study of users is limited to a single country for you to make the case that 'no-one uses their crypto' globally? You have done the same mistake with all your sources and estimates, thus making your complaint(s) beyond invalid.

So you are telling me the overall trend and interest is going down, and the merchant such as the OP still cannot accept USDC and I cannot do this right now since you said 'nothing has changed'? Are you still stuck in 2017 or are you prolonging your appeal to ignorance?

As multiple times already. I'm saying that e-commerce interest for crypto sad payment option is almost zero compared with other payment options.

I've shown you multiple sources with stats.

You've come up with limited edition virtual goods ( collectibles) and fan based investing which I've already stated is the only thing hodlers would spend there money on ( = 'investing', ugh).

The latest stats found are from 2020, not 2017. You've shown none.

No one in real life cares about crypto payments, because the 20 procent that have a median amount of 191$ did it as a bet/investment.

The US is one of the richest countries where people would buy things with crypto, you haven't given a better country.

Nobody cares in rl cares. Come on with real stats or proof. Then I could consider it for my e-commerce clients where there is 0% interest in crypto ( yes, outside of the US).

Perhaps you are living in 2017 where there was a hype and it went away. It's 2017 all over, but now because of a pandemic..

This is really funny: NFT vs OpenSea vs crypto.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Bitcoin interest in 2017 was even miles ahead of all the current useless FOMO going on.

Interest is even fading away again.

You're just reliving the past without acknowledging the end-result.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Note: digital currencies from countries is not what i consider any of the current solutions too. It will be a unrelated coin to the current existing ones.

> You're just reliving the past without acknowledging the end-result.

So that means 'this time' you know exactly what happens after this 'useless FOMO going on' crashes again? So Stripe, Coinbase, Shopify, BitPay, Circle.com are getting into something with low interest in the future because you rushed to Google Trends since you don't have any definitive sources on stablecoins, only Bitcoin? I never mentioned or argued for payments using Bitcoin in the first place and still no-one here has definitive and extensive sources on this for payments with stablecoins as it is extremely early and given the absence of clearer regulations on this as already admitted by you: [0]

'A lot of it is still going to uncharted territory.' [0]

> Note: digital currencies from countries is not what i consider any of the current solutions too. It will be a unrelated coin to the current existing ones.

And what is this 'unrelated coin to the current existing ones' you are mentioning? Do you have sources of its properties or are you speculating like everyone else?

It is another way of saying 'It may or may not be a stablecoin' So no-one knows until the regulations around this are clearer.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736645

> So that means 'this time' you know exactly what happens after this 'useless FOMO going on' crashes again?

I sold at 18 k in 2017, that was almost spot on. None of the fundamentals why i sold have changed.

You could have just looked up stablecoin and give me a better trend if you even remotely bothered. Bitcoin is the top search. You can't even see the interest in stablecoin in comparison: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

The unrelated coin is one that is created by the countries themselves, there are currently 10 k. Coins, it would be naive to think that a country would adopt an existing coin since it's easy to create.

Just read the news, none of them are adopting an existing one... It's also a minimal effort to look it up, if you bothered.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/22/the-fed-is-evaluating-whethe...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2021/html/ecb.pr2107...

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2021/12/30/mexicos-cen...

https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/china-moves-closer-...

https://www.bobsguide.com/articles/uks-new-settlement-system...

Companies already implemented and removed it before. Bitpay, circle, coinbase is directly correlated to crypto. The other ones have like a 4 person team on it. It's a neglectible effort for the "what if" case. ( Eg. Stripe had > 4 k. Employees and 4-5 people working on crypto)

Here's another one: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/06/microsoft-drops-azure-blo...

> Microsoft credited industry changes and declined interest in the product as the main reasons for discontinuing the marketing of Azure Blockchain.

Declining interest also with AWS : https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

It's not even reaching halve it's 2017 peak.

But i understand, you don't have any resources to show that anyone actually cares outside of the FOMO.

Note: if you consider El Salvador that tweets "bought the dip" every month as a serious comparison to the real world, that's pretty silly. They wanted the first movers advantage, let's see how that plays out in reality.

A long way of saying they are developing their own CBDCs, which again we both know it would be extremely silly to run a Google Trends search and comparison on 'CBDCs' against Bitcoin for something that is also too early, recently launched or still in development to draw definitive conclusions due to the trialing, regulations and uncertainty in all of these projects. (Even already admitted by you.)

So once again, it is too early for both and as this whole thread has revealed, no-one has worldwide substantiative data on this (yet).

> Microsoft credited industry changes and declined interest in the product as the main reasons for discontinuing the marketing of Azure Blockchain.

Dropping your home grown solution and partnering with a dedicated and better one means 'blockchain' in general has failed? So the partner, Consensys (Who is also part of a CBDC technology group in Asia and Europe) has closed down their blockchain offerings too and their customers can't run it on Azure either?

> But i understand, you don't have any resources to show that anyone actually cares outside of the FOMO.

Everyone in this thread has admitted and proven that no-one has definitive and extensive sources on payments with stablecoins or even CBDCs as both are too early, still developing / planning or they are still trialling it? I never brought up or mentioned anything about Bitcoin in this whole thread, yet you cannot and will not ignore it. Everyone is waiting for regulations in all of this.

> Note: if you consider El Salvador that tweets "bought the dip" every month as a serious comparison to the real world, that's pretty silly.

Did I argue that, mention or make a comparison towards El Salvador's Bitcoin buying problem anywhere?

In the US (and many other countries) as soon as the cryptocurrency is “under your control” tax issues hit. Because of this the taxation and accounting for these transactions is ridiculous:

- Get BTC from customer with X value in USD at time of sale

- Trade to USD with Y value at time of trade

- Track AND report gain/loss between X and Y values

…so in addition to all of the accounting and reporting overhead you get the added benefit of never really knowing what you’re selling anything for in your local currency.

Unless you’re a cryptocurrency maximalist or selling to a cryptocurrency audience this just doesn’t make any sense.

This is not specific to crypto. Rather this is simply how dealing with foreign currencies and tradable assets/securities works.

What people might not realize is that these very standard accounting and taxation rules do apply to crypto.

That's absolutely true but this is one of the many things that's "just handled" and abstracted away to the point of invisible with Stripe, etc.

As a founder of my third startup with 1,000 different things to worry about I can't imagine adding this to that list.

You're absolutely correct - even though the IRS released tax guidance and policy on cryptocurrencies in 2014 it's amazing how many people in the cryptocurrency community are unaware or willfully ignorant of the tax implications. When I've brought it up the overwhelming response has been "Yeah right taxes LOL" usually followed by some kind of ad hominem attack or anti-government rant.

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