Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I've Made to Date
centernetworks.com
centernetworks.com
The title needs editing.
New idea- site which gives you a brain teaser/ test at XXpm/am in the evening to help you realize if you are not pumping on all cylinders.
I am also curious why their list of alternatives was so short... no Chase Paymentech? no Litle & Co? There are numerous players in this space that handle large clients, not just the three being compared here. The article only states that they did research, and ended up with that list. :(
I think one of the big factors in going with Stripe over PP Payments Pro was the strong technical side that Stripe offers.
I do not know if you (or anyone) would count them as a "traditional merchant account provider", however (or if they are really a "merchant account provider" at all; I will be honest and say I'm still behind on some of these terms).
(Also, for completeness: Amazon Flexible Payments, in a similar boat to PayPal and thereby falling under the same "already need" reason you list, also has good mechanisms for automatic chargeback reconciliation and reporting.)
I am bias since I work at Litle & Co. My team implemented the chargeback upload API years back, it's great to see it catching on.
Litle has some neat features including a JavaScript API for tokenization that we call Pay Page.
I won't go on self promoting, however I can answer questions if you have them. I follow hacker news because of my personal interest in software development.
Stripe's API sure is spiffy (they're on my short list of backup payment services), but not that different than, say, Authorize.net which would be a cheap gateway option for most merchant accounts. Making a charge, refund or storing a credit card number in their secure vault offering are all a matter of a simple HTTP POST of a couple XML fields. That's not anything new, their API and others have been around for years and years.
Stripe is way better than paypal. It is also really expensive. Unless you are a hobby website, I wouldn't give it much thought, except for something to grow up out of. For real businesses, I think the flexibility afforded by a real merchant account plus gateway (Braintree, Litle, or Samurai) is worth a lot.
And frankly my post has a lot more to do with the order flow than Stripe because you could insert Braintree or a regular payment provider in the place of Stripe and the post still holds.
I was really hoping I wouldn't react that way because I like what Stripe is doing.
It doesn't have to be one payment processor or the other -- many major ecommerce retailers, and you, too! can have a credit card form on site and a PayPal button on the page to skip it.
I offer it on all my sites and >50% choose PayPal, both for one-off payments and subscriptions.
Specifically, we do not know whether the credit card ends up on your server (possibly stored poorly), and just knowing you use Stripe (which allows for that not to happen) doesn't guarantee that your server has the requisite security required to not have been modified to send the things we enter to a third party.
(That said, I will say that I am not actually the kind of person who fears using my credit card online, so I may be simulating this argument train incorrectly; these thoughts go through my head, but my reasons for often using PayPal when provided the option have more to do with liking the kinds of reporting I can easily do using their APIs.)
One thing I absolutely wanted in our new system was that we were never going to store the cc# - that's one of the reasons I liked Paypal/GC because we never stored the cc number. I read something about a wine store being hacked and the hackers getting all of the credit card numbers recently.
(Honestly, and I realize this is a stupid bias on my part, I'd trust your site more if the labels on the text boxes lined up with text boxes. I think it is fair to say, however, that a lot of people have silly biases like that, as a lot of time you are just fighting with some gut feeling someone is getting about your site as they are about to convert, and not any appeal to rational argument.)
(Again, though: I am actually the kind of person who tends to just use their credit card willy nilly. I, personally, would have no serious problem signing up for your site as is. However, if you had PayPal as a payment option, I'd use it, and in the end it could actually save you money. If you had Amazon Flexible Payments as a payment option I'd definitely use it, and it would almost certainly save you money.)
As for Amazon, I spoke with them at length - their FPS service won't work for us they said.
Thanks so much for your feedback
It seems to me that users have already decided to trust us at the point of putting in credit card information, and sending them off-site required them to rethink it.
> What I found was that a number of customers filled > in our order form, went off to Paypal or Google > Checkout, but never completed the order.
On my site, I've made all the numbers public. Over the last 6 months, roughly 25% of people start questions, but then don't pay.
Compare these 2 charts. The first shows the number of paid questions per week:
http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyQuestionsPerWeek
and this shows the questions that people started but then never paid for:
http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerW...
I'm guessing that the numbers would improve if we weren't using PayPal, so next week I'm planning to try to use Stripe.
However, I am sad to say, for making payments I am still stuck with PayPal for awhile, as I can not see anything else that is so easy. On any given day my website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50. Right now I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed money from my PayPal account. But the payments are usually small. On a normal night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like this:
$24
$14
$12
$9
$7
$7
$5
$4
$4
$3
$3
$3
$2
$2
$2
$2
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
I use the PayPal MassPay API. I've looked into other services for sending payments, such as Payoneer, but none have such wide acceptance as PayPal.
Any suggestions for sending automated payments, other than PayPal?
I have an affiliate relationship setup with one company - and make about $50 a month or so - they pay via paypal and that is perfect. I am not sure I would want to bother with it if they required me to setup a new account with some other program.
https://www.cloudcontacts.com/order
Does pressing the button confirm the order, or does pressing the button take you to a page where you confirm the order?
possibly some helper text that says something to the effect of "confirm your order on the next page"?
If your competitor sells $1 eBooks using Stripe, there's an easy way to move him out of business: buy 10'000, then ask for a chargeback on each of them.
There's got to be a better way to do this.