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Comment by mjallday | Hacker News Reader

> Integrating billing into an app used to be a pain in the ass. I remember integrating BrainTree into a previous startup back in 2008, and it was a four month long process. Applying for a merchant account to even start accepting credit card payments took at least three months to get approved.

This is a massive win. I remember trying to setup payments and begin rejected several times by Worldpay and this was a process that took several months and required us to keep funds in escrow. Ultimately we settled on PayPal integration which required sending customers off to paypal.com and hoping they went through with it.

I'd love to see some case-studies in terms of conversion rates for completing transactions when it comes to keeping customers on site to do payments versus sending them to a 3rd party.

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(I'm a developer at Braintree.)

The blog post was discussing the 2008 version of the Braintree APIs. We completely rewrote our core APIs in 2009. Today, I think we provide one of the most elegant payment APIs available.

We've also significantly decreased the amount of time it takes to get a merchant account -- we have an instant application process now in the US, so many of our merchants are approved and provisioned with an account as soon as they hit the "Apply" button. Our international application process isn't instant yet, but we're working hard to make it as fast as possible.

I've had a very good experience integrating with Braintree. For my use case, most of my customers have existing merchant accounts with significantly lower rates than they would pay through Stripe (or a competing product), so the ability to migrate those accounts into our Braintree account was a big win for us. Their Node.JS docs leave something to be desired, but their API is very clean and intuitive.

Can you email me at lionel.barrow@getbraintree.com? I'd like to know where we can improve our docs.

For what it's worth, that is not my experience. Setting up a merchant account with Braintree is a pain (but far less of one than going through a typical broker). It took me less than three weeks, most of which was spent waiting.

And the Braintree API is almost as good as Stripe's, if not equally good (it lagged a couple years ago, but they've been catching up). Stripe is a little bit slicker in my view, but not dramatically so. For normal stuff, your'e not going to see a huge difference in development time - certainly less than a man-month with either provider.

I eventually switched to Stripe because it was cheaper at low volumes (this was important to my project since it was bootstrapped), simpler, and they never asked for a personal guarantee. But it wasn't a huge difference operationally. Both companies provide very good support and are perfectly acceptable.

Both are miles ahead of Auth.net and Paypal, which are pretty horrible.

While everything practically useful almost always takes longer than almost anyone thinks it possibly could, I'm curious about some of the times I've seen in this discussions lately.

Honest question: What is it about Stripe (picking this one specifically due to having used it) that would take a month of work? Their documentation is thorough but -- at least last time I used it -- totally lacking in examples, so patching together a server-side workflow for creating and charging against profiles took a couple days of on-and-off work, but a month? I can see this if it includes other development on the project, but as far as actually getting the relevant parts of the API integrated and working, I'm wondering if other people's experience has been vastly different with this.

Seems like Stripe and the rest could help themselves by being easy to set up and use (that is, if they provided examples or various scenarios).

I've done two stripe implementations and one Braintree. None took more than a week of coding and that's being generous. Although I imagine if you had a really complex system, you could take a while.

Sorry, I should have prefaced my conversation, I was based in Singapore at the time so didn't have access to the plethora of beautiful payment options that are available in the US.

Where these new services win out is the ability to instantly be underwritten as a merchant and start processing. For WorldPay I had to submit passport, bank account statements (via fax no less), sign my life away etc.

Here is patio11's

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/06/stripe-and-ab-testing-ma...

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