Stripe Connect | Hacker News Reader

Stripe Connect

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191 pointsnaz68 comments

It's almost impossible to overstate the disruption Stripe is causing, and this is taking it to a whole other level.

We have an app (http://tulasoftware.com) that yoga studios use to run their business and we're able to compete with some very well funded companies in no small part because of our Stripe integration.

We've been guiding people through the stripe account creation process though, and having them manually enter their API keys. This basically eliminates the need for any manual intervention at all.

So awesome.

I'm interested to hear how you guys are doing the integration? (Integration meaning your users create Stripe accounts). Do you guys direct them to Stripe.com and offer instructions on how to do it?

Yeah, right now we essentially say 'hey, go get a stripe account, then come back and give us your api keys'. We give them some video tutorials along the way to explain what an API key is, how it works, and how to set up the integration.

It's relatively smooth, but definitely not as smooth as this new feature allows for.

I'm very impressed that works for Yoga studio owners. Do you have anyone balk at the requirements for this such as the bank account?

Not really. Most of them understand that in order for them to get their deposits they need to provide their bank account info.

Completely OT but I really like your site's design.

Since the other submission seems to have disappeared, here's the associated blog post:

https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect

This is a great feature, but before I start sending my clients to Stripe to create an account, they need to build a portal designed for that kind of user. "Payments for Developers" doesn't sound right to them.

Yeah, we'll probably build something like that at some point. Stripe Connect has been in production for months on a lot of different sites, though, and the lack of this hasn't seemed to cause issues in practice. So we decided it shouldn't hold up the launch.

https://stripe.com/docs/connect#payments-flow - The screenshots on this page are what your clients would see if you told them to create an account with Stripe.

That's pretty cool, I didn't know that, but it isn't going to be enough. Would you sign up for a site that needs your bank routing number simply based on a small dialog?

When is Stripe coming to Liechtenstein? Really, what's the hold up?

I cant tell if this was a joke or not... EVERY SINGLE post about stripe, the first comment is always "When is stripe coming to X country".

日本!

I want them to come to Okrug. When will they come to Okrug!?

Elbonia?

Singapore!

Malaysia!

UK!

Nigeria!

I'm recently converted to Stripe Connect for http://www.buyplaytix.com and I LOVE it. So far I haven't had a single ticket seller complain about having to switch over to it, and not one support request.

We've been using this for awhile for Zenbox, and it's been such a pleasure. The implementation was straightforward, and it instantly made Stripe the easiest integration for our users. We've since pushed every one of our providers for OAuth as it's just so much nicer from a user's perspective.

Well done to Stripe for such experience-focused feature releases.

Dear Stripe, please come to Europe and take my money.

Same for Asia. I'm reckon the revenue generated by expanding their services overseas would be well worth the additional headache.

Can anyone more knowledgeable (who knows about this industry or finance) enlighten me regarding what could be the possible reasons that may be stopping this company from doing so despite all this demand?

Seriously guys, stop this. It's never as simple as "oh man Stripe needs to come to [country I just so happen to live in] because they'd make so much money it can't be that hard." Yes, it can and it is. Stripe is doing everything right - focusing on a quality product and taking small steps to make it available to as many people as possible without damaging the quality of that product. It's a hell of a lot easier for someone in Germany to rip off Stripe and comply with all the German regulations than it is for Stripe to come in with no assets on the ground and figure it all out.

They could be in Asia and the entire EU in under a year, I'm pretty sure. Their platform would implode and we'd all talk about how Stripe used to be good, and now it's worse than PayPal and how the executives screwed the pooch.

To do things right takes time. Months, even years. If Stripe isn't available in your country, maybe you should build it.

Disclosure: I do not work for Stripe, but I've worked with their API as well as the APIs of Piryx/Rally and PayPal. Stripe's is the best (Piryx is a close second but they've transitioned to Rally and last I checked Rally didn't have an API), and I'm as huge a fan as I could be having never processed a penny of real money through their servers.

>Seriously guys, stop this.

I am genuinely curious as to what is stopping them from doing it (considering Paypal, 2checkout, etc are already doing it). I think I have some understanding about it now after reading SoftwareMaven's comment.

> It's a hell of a lot easier for someone in Germany to rip off Stripe and comply with all the German regulations than it is for Stripe to come in with no assets on the ground and figure it all out.

Unfortunately, that is just as bad and does not solve the problem, because most online businesses cater to a global audience (unless dealing in tangible products) so any payment processor just limited to Germany can never fully compete or replace competitors who do.

It's been discussed in every Stripe thread in existence.

Every payment processing thread...

I would assume that Stripe would like to be in every locale and demand has nothing to do with it, they are just having to make sure they're fully compliant in each major area of the world they want to enter. That is probably a very large obstacle to overcome.

Sometimes it is best to go for it. I remember reading an interview of the Paypal co-founder in which he said that when his site was launched he saw a lot of demand from eBay users but since they thought their site was not ready(?) for that, the fought tooth and nail to keep them away. But then something changed and they started allowing eBay users to use their service and the rest is history.

It could be a similar turning point from Stripe as well. Every time this comes up a good portion of the thread is dedicated to them not being International. Maybe if they just started doing this on a trial basis they will see how much business they have untapped. Or maybe some other business can use this leverage to offer similar services to instantly enter the market.

This is not a case of "the experience isn't quite right". Finance is a heavily regulated area and failure to dot your i's and cross your t's could mean jail time or fines consisting of very large sums of money. Furthermore, failure to understand how to protect against fraud in each region is a costly mistake (one PayPal spent $300M learning).

Sometime "launch it and hope for the best" is not the right answer (though it very often is).

Stripe already works everywhere for customers, so it's compliant, right? I.e. Stripe can accept credit card payments from everywhere. The current problem is setting up payments for businesses. Could someone explain why the recipient country matters?

Startup idea: Set up US based company that redirects money to countries outside USA.

If you want to create a marketplace. your user has to be in the U.S. in order for them to get paid.

I know nothing about the regulation hurdles of payment processing, but I would assume that there is a massive difference between laws regulating how to make payments from a foreign country and how to accept payments as a company in a foreign country.

Any idea if or when we'd be able to white label the account creation process and/or use the API to register users?

I know it's a bit of a leap to get someone willing to sign up for my service just to have to say "okay, now you just need to sign up for this other service you've never heard of..."

We're currently thinking about this, but no concrete plans or timeline yet -- sorry!

We've tried to make it as seamless as possible for your users to create an account; it's baked right into the authentication flow instead of having them separately register. Hopefully that helps, would love to hear your thoughts here (amber@stripe.com).

https://stripe.com/docs/connect#payments-flow

Thanks for the response, Amber. This is definitely the best alternative to just saying "I need you to create a Stripe account, come back when you've done it."

Whenever I see stripe use oauth in a new product I get excited thinking that they're offering OAuth to buyers. I would love to see a service that serves OAuth with integrated recurring payments. Think DailyCred but with monthly paid plans for users.

It's on our roadmap. :)

Please Stripe, hear me: micropayment support.

It pains me to watch all these awesome features rolling out but knowing that the pricing is keeping me from signing up. The app I'm building will allow sellers to charge ~$1 for items, and with the 30¢ + 2.9%, Stripe's fees take up a third of the revenue. Hard to convince sellers to use a platform that takes that much.

AWS and PayPal seem like the only viable options for us, at this point, but I anxiously await the day that Stripe rolls out a micropayment pricing tier.

No one has solved the micropayments problem (yet). Given the way the world works at present, Stripe would lose money on every micropayment.

Payments to users is a HUGE deal for lots of services. Really happy to see that.

This is a game changer to me. Everyone has always been really gungho on systems to get paid, but there is relatively little activity around paying people or facilitating others getting paid. Really only Paypal, Wepay, and Poundpay/Balanced are in this space so it's much wider open to better players than the getting paid side of things.

We've been exercising this API for a couple weeks at DigMyData. So far so good. Right now the API event history only goes back 30 days so we're having to "create history" so we can offer some metrics that need events (like cancellations). Keep up the great work Stripe.

It seems as though Kickstarter should be using this. They currently charge up to 10% for successfully funded projects. Their rationale is they use Amazon Payments to process transactions. Amazon charges 3-5% on top of Kickstarter's cut of 5%. If Stripe charges 2.9% + $.30 that still leaves a couple points on the table for either Kickstarter profits or to lower the fee for creators. http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#Wha...

Amazon's rates are actually pretty much the same: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022

I implemented stripe connect on https://donat.io and it is awesome! The webhooks are great and the ouath flow is super simple too.

Loving it.

I love Stripe. Really I do. But until I can accept users from around the world, it seems pretty pointless to use it for a marketplace.

This is awesome and I've already been building an MVP based on Stripe connect. Hoping to launch it this week.

FYI, for Rails developers, there's a nice Omniauth/Stripe strategy: https://github.com/isaacsanders/omniauth-stripe-platform

Btw, this has since been changed to: https://github.com/isaacsanders/omniauth-stripe-connect

How many end users know they have a Stripe account? Actually, do any end users currently have a Stripe account?

Sorry, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but in case it helps to clarify: Stripe Connect is for sellers, not buyers.

Right, so let's say I run a marketplace for video games and such. Back in the day, we used PayPal MassPay to send payments to our sellers. That required the sellers to have PayPal accounts to sell on our platform, which almost all of them had already. Seems like for Stripe Connect to work, our sellers would have to create Stripe accounts.

My understanding until now was that only developers of websites would have a need for a Stripe account, and if I merely purchased something via CC on a Stripe-enabled website, I did not have a Stripe account. So as a marketplace, I have to encourage/demand that my sellers create an account with a third party that they haven't heard of before.

Given that I would want to use Stripe if I were building Dawdle from scratch again, is there a way to have them create a Stripe account without them knowing they're creating a Stripe account?

Ah -- so, users can create Stripe accounts during the OAuth flow.

Check out https://stripe.com/docs/connect#payments-flow, for example. A logged-in user will see the page on the left, while a new user will see the page on the right.

That make sense?

Yup, gotcha - I'd want to customize that page on the right, although maybe that's not possible. (I already know the level of transactions for my accounts on average, but perhaps you need that data for underwriting?)

We let you pre-fill certain information (for your user's convenience): https://stripe.com/docs/connect/reference#get-authorize-requ...

This also confused me initially.

I think your copy needs some improvement for clarity.

Not sure why this is "hot news" its been around for awhile. It was known as Stripe Apps before.

We are using Stripe for payments, and this new Stripe service would really help us make it easy to pay our affiliates!

I love Stripe. First Canada, now this?

Love the application fee. Heres to hopping it comes to subscription billing soon!

Am I the only one who thinks Stripe might be the most important YC startup ever?

What are the fees when transferring between stripe accounts?

You can't transfer between Stripe accounts. Charges going through Connect have the same fees as ones not going through connect (namely, 2.9% and $0.30).

If you're using our application_fee parameter to take your own fee out of a transaction, you get the full amount you request. Both that full amount, and the Stripe fee for the charge, are subtracted from the total amount paid to the seller.

To illustrate, a $100 charge with a $1 application fee would end up sending $1 to the application, $3.20 to Stripe, and $95.80 to the seller.

This is a huge problem for me. My marketplace was designed to take commissions out of each sale so our application fee is $0. I have to charge the customers who buy the products the full amount, and then a percentage of the sale is disbursed to the seller and our site (the application).

If there are multiple parties involved in referring the sale, I will be charged not one but a multiple of the Stripe fees whenever money is disbursed to appropriate parties involved in one single sale.

Furthermore, because I have to process returns I will not be able to send the payment directly to the seller immediately. The payment would be retained in my account after a period of time before I could transfer it to the sellers.

Love this company.

Enough already. We all love stripe. Agreed. Lets not upvote just because.

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