So what's a better alternative to PayPal and Stripe? Plaid? Square? Do these even offer the same services?
Like SWIFT but faster and not $25.
Most of the conventional merchant services platforms do this, but they lack all of the modern-web polish that stripe and paypal and square have. They will happily take your volume on a cost-plus basis if you can handle the absolutely disgusting 1998 web presence and lack of docs, and often the antiquated API's that use SOAP and XML.
They're great. They don't change. All payments API's are shit, but one that is predictably shit and doesn't change once you've dealt with the shit is a quasi-meta-good thing as bad as that sounds. You have a person you can speak to, they know you on a first name basis, and they do a single thing- facilitate your ability to process payments.
This liberates me from running a web server, having my own URL, or doing any kind of coding. I love coding, and do it all the time by day, but it would add a layer of complexity to my business that I don't need.
PP has worked fine for me, but they always say that you should have a backup.
Other than that, I always appreciate when one can simply fall back to a bank transfer, then I can choose to just give them 100% of the money without risk to either party (no magic fraud detection, no cut going to paypal) at the cost of waiting a few days for the payment to be confirmed. So basically, just post your IBAN on your website please and offer to tick that as a payment option. No third party needed besides the bank account that you already need for running a business.
As a consumer, I can just download the transaction list as CSV. There doesn't really need to be a standard API if it takes 5 minutes to map your bank's fields in your favorite scripting language. For business accounts, I'm presuming this will be similar, if not better because they would more frequently actually use it.
Even including thorough testing, it should be a few hours of work, and for that you can save whatever cut third parties would otherwise take before it lands in your bank account, plus the consumer doesn't need to deal with fraud shenanigans that might trip incorrectly.
> even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant
Yes, I mentioned that as a downside and it really is one, but for anything but food delivery I'm quite likely to choose this option. The anti-fraud on other methods, as someone frequently working across borders and with uBlock and such installed, just makes it impossible or annoyingly hard to pay too often otherwise. Plus, I don't want to give paypal more money if that choice is available to me.
This is not possible with US-style bank transfers at this time.