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Comment by t0 | Hacker News Reader

But wont most of Braintree's customers jump ship rather than deal with Paypal? They're effectively killing it by buying it.

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As a braintree customer, this deal does give me cause for worry since I jumped to Braintree because of paypal.

However realistically, since all of our production code is already completed and tested against Braintree, we are not going to switch unless they do something really dumb like close their api.

For me as long as Braintree continues:

+ Using their 'vault' for credit cards

+ Continues having a great api

+ Continues have great customer service.

I'm going to watch and see what happens.

I worry that PayPal might change the “Take your vaulted cards to another processor” policy…

If they do, it’s going to cause a lot of headaches for customers.

Well that assumes that the business owner wants to switch out of Braintree. But you are right that if Paypal closes the garden, you are stuck in that silo.

But on the other hand, it isn't so different than being walled into AWS for instance in terms of production impact time.

It’s not the code changes or downtime you have to worry about — it’s convincing all of your customers to enter their billing details again (if you can’t get the vaulted cards transferred).

This is one of the major value propositions with Spreedly. Independently vault your cards.

> They're effectively killing it by buying it.

I don't see how you come to that conclusion. This is not the first time PayPal has acquired a popular payment processor. In 2005, they purchased Verisign's payment processing business, Payflow Pro. I don't recall them making any noticeable changes to it after acquisition other than changing the word "Verisign" to "PayPal" everywhere. Is there some reason to believe that a Braintree acquisition will not be treated similarly?

Absolutely. Companies approach Braintree because they want a no-bullshit payments processor. Based on PayPal's past antics it hardly it hardly has the reputation for which people seek Braintree.

I think this is the perfect opportunity for Stripe, and other payments processors that cater to younger more progressive companies, to get some clients to jump ship.

To read people like Patrick McKenzie, who ran businesses on Paypal and don't have a lot of negative things to say about their underwriting process, two big reasons why they've moved to Stripe:

(1) The Paypal API is apparently extremely complicated

(2) Processing payments with Paypal takes your users off your own site, which costs conversions

Buying Braintree could immediately address both those problems for Paypal.

Yes, PayPal is awful once you've used Stripe and Braintree. I hope that if this happens PayPal just lets Braintree operate as it has before. Legacy PayPal users can keep PayPal, and PayPal doesn't have to fight the battles it has been fighting to keep customers from jumping ship, and can just onboard them to Braintree. Unfortunately, I'm not super optimistic about PayPal's competence.

No. That line of thinking is incredibly tired.

Why not? We switched from PayPal to Braintree explicitly because PayPal was too broken for our use case. Is there some indication to expect that Braintree won't be integrated into the rest of PayPal in the case of an acquisition?

I think he's got a point - users won't jump ship because Braintree (and Venmo) are now PayPal products, they'll jump ship because PayPal ruins them with fees, long payout times, etc...

If I were a Braintree customer I'd jump ship now before things get bad. Why wait? PayPal have a long history and are a known entity. There's no reason they wouldn't turn Braintree into something that feels like a PayPal company shortly after the celebrations are over and the ink is dry.

If you're a Braintree customer, jump ship while times are good before the storm arrives.

Stripe is about as good as Braintree in my experience (at least in terms of online payments processing and powering a shopping cart), and has fantastic customer service. But if Braintree is working, why switch now? Stripe is really easy to integrate if you have to later.

Braintree kills its competitors in P2P payments though. Venmo has been a huge improvement in my life.

Why wait until things get bad? That's like being in an area where there's a real tsunami warning and saying "hey, it's calm now ... I'll just wait until the waves get here before I leave!" The waves will come and you'll be caught off guard.

If PayPal buys Braintree it's likely the PayPal culture will rub off and they'll stop being the great company they are now. This is the reason I'd dig my well before I'm thirsty and switch to a company that doesn't appear headed for a beheading by PayPal.

That's not a good analogy. Switching from PayPal to Stripe is currently very easy (I did it a few weeks ago). Nothing like fleeing an area with a tsunami warning. When switching costs are that low, why not stick with something that is working?

Because what happens when your Braintree account gets arbitrarily frozen under PayPal's risk management policies? It might be working today, but that doesn't mean the rug won't be pulled from out underneath you, and at that stage there will be real consequences for your business, i.e. frozen funds and drama. Then you've got to do the whole migration while putting out a fire.

If you wouldn't want to do business with PayPal, you probably wouldn't want to do business with Braintree if it's owned by PayPal. A different brand doesn't mean that they're not being operated by the same masters.

Aren't you a PayPal (or ex-PayPal) employee? Surely you might have a little bias here!

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