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Comment by okrasz | Hacker News Reader

In Poland (Europe) there are plenty of Stripe-like services for several years now. They mostly integrate all online payments (online wire transfers, credit cards) but also offline, where you can pay in your local shop, post office or traditional bank transfer. Virtually all banks in the Polish marked are handled. Almost no e-shop will handle payments themselves, especially that integration modules to most of e-commerce software are provided. Therefore I wonder how can it be so different in other parts of Europe?

Some samples: - http://dotpay.pl/index.php?content=&newlang=en - http://serwis.platnosci.pl/home,462.html - http://www.przelewy24.pl/en - http://www.payu.pl/ - ... and many more

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These services are to Stripe what a paper checkbook is to instant wire transfers. Yes, it's all kind-of about accepting money. But to point out just a few of the differences:

1) none of the existing services store credit card numbers, which means you have to run your customers through their horrible redirects and web forms every time they want to purchase something,

2) none allow subscription charging (see also (1) above for the reason why),

3) did I mention the horrible web forms, silly redirects, abysmal failure handling and overall user unfriendliness? Did I mention that they display ADVERTISEMENTS on their payment pages? I'm not kidding.

4) there is no developer API to speak of. You just redirect your customers to their horrible sites, cross your fingers and pray. Some of them might pay, some of them might even come back.

If Stripe were to become available in Poland, I'd switch in an instant.

OK, I see the point now.

Define "Stripe-like". The point here is a developer-friendly, full-stack service with a simple payment setup (2.9%+30c is a great start). It feels... modern. The websites you link to feel similar to every other service we trudged through trying to find something good. Sure, they might work. But are they how you'd design them yourself?

OK, I might not understand what is so special about Stripe. But as for cost they charge for transactions, for typical payment channels 2.8% + ~10c (0.30 PLN), but may vary on some payment channels. There might be a minor activation cost of about $3.

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