Stripe launches beta in Ireland | Hacker News Reader

Stripe launches beta in Ireland

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81 pointsblackdogie51 comments

They just launched in the UK, too. I integrated them in about 2 hours and took a setup fee payment (£1,200) with zero hassle within hours of getting the beta email.

Awesome stuff. Best payment provider integration experience I've ever had (and I've had a few).

? I thought they were still in beta in the UK, and their front page still offers only United States and Canada as options.

It's a private beta, but it only takes emailing them to get in.

I want to use them; but they can't take $US without a US bank account (we have a $US UK based bank account) or do Amex yet. Hopefully soon.

Agreed, this is a massive pain - I'd love to start using them but I need to bill in USD, and getting a US bank account from the UK is a big unknown.

I spoke to them at their hack day in London at the beginning of April, and they said they expected to solve this in 1-3 months. So hopefully within the next 6 weeks if we're optimistic!

Did they give any indication of how they're going to solve it?

Hopefully something as 'simple' as USD charges getting sent to my GBP account, taking a forex hit along the way. I'd rather that than the red tape of setting up a US account.

Personally I want them to send $USD to a UK bank in $US. I set one of these up with barclays; it was trivial and low fees. Can then use transferwise to get $USD into £GBP and avoid the 2.5% forex tax our lovely banks charge.

That's good to know. I've not put Stripe live because of this. It all looks great, but the inability to handle multiple currencies is a deal breaker for now.

GBP, USD, and EUR are a minimum, imo. Been doing that elsewhere since the 1990s. That's not meant to be snarky, simply factual.

Does that mean you can only accept payment from British credit cards alone? Like if I'm selling an ebook, a US buyer can't buy it?

You can accept payments with credit and debit cards from customers anywhere in the world. Currently the Stripe UK and Ireland betas support Visa and MasterCard, with American Express payments coming soon

Did you try out Recurly? I'm curious to see a comparison (on the zero hassle part especially).

Recurly is not a payment processor / merchant account. It is just subscription billing logic as a service, sitting on top of your actual processor.

They do provide a payment gateway, but you have to have a separate merchant account. The gateway is a relatively new feature.

Gateways are themselves just more APIs. They don't have much, if any, impact on the "zero hassle" question you asked, which is all about the lack of an application/underwriting process compared to getting a merchant account. There's no separate application/underwriting for getting gateway accounts, your MAP typically resells one or more and just gives you credentials once you're through the MA underwriting and get account numbers to attach to it. Recurly doesn't save you from that at all.

We're on the UK beta, still a bit confused though - is it all still in test mode only?

Nope I'm pretty sure you can accept normal payments (I'm in the UK BETA and I can.) Make sure you've verified your account and added a bank account :-)

I can't see anywhere to add a bank account, and activate account only lists US & Canada which is stopping me activating it. Am I on the wrong beta?

Time to drop Stripe an email I think!

You have to click the invite email and attach your account rather than just going to the panel.

If you can only see US and Canada your account isn't beta activated, when this happened to me I emailed support and they responded with a new beta key within the hour.

Stripe really is great, it's easy to implement onsite & doing away with merchant accounts. The first site I built with it has been happily taking live orders for over a week with no problems.

Hey Tom, if you want to chat about Stripe implementation we should use it as an excuse to pop down to the Sussex Arms ;)

Well, we've taken a live payment from a live credit card...

I'm in the UK too, tested it with a CC and it worked fine, recurring payment actually came out of the account last week. Worked a treat!

You can make live charges as soon as you activate your account at https://manage.stripe.com/account/details

Do you know if they support Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode? Fairly essential when doing b2c transactions with "real" goods.

Not for now, but they should. The problem is that you need to take your customer to another site and that screws all the transparency (Doing everything in just one site) and simplicity that you have right now.

Indeed. Its a shame though, at least not to offer it as an option, as it places a lot more liability on the merchant. At least as an option you can profile your customers first and choose who to use it on.

I've seen some pretty scary numbers on the effect of 3-D Secure payments to conversion rates. I guess it's really hard to do The Right Thing™ on this matter.

Numbers for good or worst? They help A LOT fighting fraud. I think a good solution could be implementing it on Stripe.js.

The latter. It's probably a combination of breaking the UX by redirecting the user to his/her banks' website and the crappy forms the banks made for this.

Out of interest, where did you register your interest to be part of the Beta? Apart from news articles, I've seen little official talk of the beta or the status of it.

(I work at Stripe) Please sign up at https://stripe.com/global and we'll send you an invite in the next couple of days

Since you work at Stripe, hopefully you see this.

I have Stripe Connect users with my website. I need them to sign up for the UK, but would rather not want them to go through the hassle of waiting for a Beta Code setup.

Just thought I would point that out.

Thanks for the feedback! Working on making Stripe Connect sign up easier for beta users.

The email that was sent from stripe

We're getting in touch because you asked to be notified when Stripe was available in Ireland. Good news: we are up and running in private beta, and we're excited to invite you to take part.

As of today, you can accept Visa and MasterCard transactions. You can choose to accept payments denominated in euros, with American Express and US dollar denominated transactions coming soon. All our standard docs and features apply -- jump in at https://stripe.com/docs.*

So nice to see € there. But I would like to know if they have any roadmap for expanding to other countries. I'm from Spain and about to start a business, and I would love to set up payments with stripe and would like to know if it will be available in my country when we launch. Any information?

y'know, we're supposed to have a common single market here in EU (and especailly within the eurozone). But it just seems like there is all these little examples of it not being a single market. ☹

unfortunately this is so true.

Great to see Stripe expanging in Europe! We at Sellfy (http://sellfy.com/) just rolled out GPB support for Stripe UK users looking to sell their downloads. I guess the Euros for Ireland are next.

I got my invite last week and integrated it over the weekend, but I need to hold off until I can accept USD.
According to John at Stripe "Unfortunately, right now you'd need a US-routable dollar account to accept payments in USD. We're planning on having better native support for charging USD in the future, but have no timeline on it right now."
I'm planning on opening a US bank account when I'm in SF in August, if anyone knows how I can do that from Ireland instead let me know.

I guess adding multi-currency is another level of complexity, but something that I think users in Europe would want. Also exchange rates stuff probably has regulatory stuff with it too. I don't see anywhere on the stripe interface to add a 2nd bank account for a different currency. Does anyone have any tips on what banks to open a US a/c when I'm there next (I don't have a SSN).

As mentioned above, I spoke to them at their hack day in London at the beginning of April, and they said they expected to solve this in 1-3 months. So hopefully within the next 6 weeks if we're optimistic!

Am I the only one who get really tired of the endless copying and imitating of Apple UIs? Look at the picture in the tweet, every single element from the gradient in the switch button, text shadows, color tones of icon and background to the section gradients. Sure, it looks nice, no doubt. But it's so un-original!

Why these kind of payment services take quite long to add a new country?
What procedures are there?

For starters, getting a local bank account for the country, making sure that you are following local banking regulations and accounting rules...

I'm in France and interviewed with two payment solutions last week (just coincidence) and ask if they knew about Stripe and its fantastic api & solution and nobody was.
I guess Stripe will have to cross the Channel at some point.

We definitely want to cross the Channel, but can't say much about timelines as yet

I got my UK invite over a month ago, I still haven't implemented it because I hadn't realised you needed SSL.

You're doing payments of some sort, of course you need TLS.

Check out https://stripe.com/help/ssl#how-do-i-set-up-ssl if you need help setting up SSL

Wow, this is awesome. Finally!

Realex will not be happy

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