Comment by templaedhel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by templaedhel | Hacker News Reader

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The better question would be "why wouldn't you ditch paypal for stripe?"

Stripe is much easier to integrate than the x.com/paypal.com family of conflicting api's, all of which lack easy to read documentation.

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

Compared to

https://stripe.com/docs

Stripe doesn't have a history of randomly locking accounts, and even if they do (if you process payments, I can understand the legal need to now and then) their customer support is so responsive and helpful I wouldn't really mind.

Stripe is easy to use. The web UI is fast, the api makes sense, I get joy out of it.

Stripe sent me a real, physical letter, to thank me. I was one of the early users of the beta, and we all got real letters, on thick cardstock, I wish I had taken a picture of it. That may be a virtue of being a small userbase startup, but if you start with that mentality, it means a lot.

Paypal does have slightly lower fees, but Stripe is worth it.

Paypal also makes it easy to add a paypal pay button to sites, but those a fraught with stories of accounts shut down, and are ugly.

I was one of the beta users too–I showed the letter to my co-founder and we both got huge smiles on our faces.

Here's a picture of it: http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j

I can only see two reasons why someone might need PayPal rather than Stripe: if the business resides outside the US, or if they need to take methods of payment other than credit cards. Other than that, Stripe seems like a no-brainer.

Josh, you are failing to recognize other reasons why a business might still consider using Paypal as their merchant account provider. Here are ours:

1) Costs. We pay 2.2% + $0.30 USD per transaction vs. Stripes' 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. At our transaction rate, that makes a difference in received revenue.

2) Moving. Refactoring a well established business to interface with a new payment provider can be a costly and expensive process. Think of switching personal banks.

3) Fraud. Paypal probably has the most advanced fraud protection in the online business today. If you deal in any decent amount of online payments you will find this to be a huge issue.

Additionally, we have our own dedicated Paypal account manager that actively reaches out to us and keeps in contact, and we can instantly call a direct line to this person if we need assistance with an issue.

With that said, our team is actively looking at Stripe because we like the ease of use when it comes to reoccurring payments, which we don't do at this time but plan to implement in the coming year. From what we see, reoccurring payments are a messy with Paypal and I'm not satisfied with Paypal's solution compared to their competitors like Recurly, Chargify, and, well, Stripe. But I am impressed with what Stripe has to offer on all fronts. Especially their API which appears to be very easy to use. ...And, they have a nice looking reoccurring payments process which fits our vision nicely.

Anyway, disclaimer: we run between 50K and 100K a month through Paypal, so that is probably why we get fantastic support from them and better pricing.

I'd love to use Stripe, however the 2.9% fee is a total deal breaker. I'm currently using Payflow Link (by PayPal and Verisign) and I pay a flat rate of $20 a month plus 500 incl monthly transactions. I can get more at 0.10 per transaction. And after that it's all done with my Merchant account, which I've been able to negotiate down below 2%.

When you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more for you big guys) in credit card transactions, eating 1% just for a friendly API is a huge turnoff.

Please Stripe, prove me wrong and provide an external merchant account option!

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