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Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

I have an idea. Would be happy to get feedback + criticism.

What if there was some standard API interface for payment processors? Basically AWS S3 API, but for payment processors.

The idea being that migration between payment providers should be low friction and standardized. If you're in Stripe jail or banned, start using paypal (or something else) just by changing endpoints + credentials.

Since Stripe is the gold standard, we could standardize on that (like how cloud providers standardized on S3).

I think India has implemented something to this effect.

Thoughts?

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This would be awesome, it's just really hard to manifest because every payment processor is different, has different life cycle events, etc. They also have different risk and antifraud functions, which you have to consider because they shape how their checkout components behave. And then they also all have slightly different payment methods that they support, each of which behave slightly differently.

You can kind of get something that approximates this with a PCI vault or a payments orchestrator, but it's really hard -- maybe impossible -- to fully abstract away all the differences.

or maybe you dont abstract it away, let each payment api behave the way their service supports, add some common functions on top that users can use and for specific functions they always look for specific classes. Ex class Gateway { abstract function send(), abtstract function receive() } class Visa extends Gateway { send()...receive()..., otherVisaSupportedFunctions() } class MasterCard extends Gateway { ....}

It won't work, the feature set offered by different payment processors differs too much to capture in one consistent API. Even Stripe itself already offers 3 or 4 different ways to integrate with them.

What you want already exists though, and it's called a payment orchestrator. They integrate with different payment providers and provide you one API. You pay for that by getting a much smaller feature set.

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