Stripe vs. Paymill | Hacker News Reader

Stripe vs. Paymill

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70 pointssippndipp34 comments

I have been working with, and implented, both Stripe and Paymill. I agree with the article that the only time you would go with Paymill is simply if Stripe is not yet available (and in those cases you are probably better off with a local competitor).

Paymill is just a bad copy of Stripe in regards of technology, customer support, processes etc. One example of this is the ID verification process. Stripe has this automated and it takes minutes to complete. With Paymill we had to send copies of several different ID documents to different people and the process took weeks.

Second that, exactly same experience. Plus Stripes API is awesome. If you want to move fast, avoid headaches, pay less fees, go with Stripe.

I've had a much higher conversion rate with PayPal, even though I love stripe. It's annoying, because it's hard to do add-on payments with PayPal. Stripe is basically a dream to work with. But, if you don't have PP, you should -- but then once you do, it torques your conversion numbers per platform because people just see the PayPal button and click it. Suddenly 90% of your sales are through PP. The fact is: no one wants to type in their CC numbers and all that nonsense. Convenience factor is huge.

It's not sensical to choose one or the other over which YOU like more. You're in business to increase profits. If that means a PayPal button, so be it.

Hm, this is very interesting to hear, and doesn't match the what we see in general or what PayPal apparently sees in aggregate[1].

I'd be very curious to hear more about your use case -- could you drop me a line? patrick@stripe.com.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Online-Shopping/When-purchasing-online-...

In our case Paymill approval process was indeed long (2 months?), but the ID verification part was quick and painless. They did require the originals via mail, but it's really not a big deal. The hold-up was with the bank and Paymill fell short in giving any idea of the ETA. They replied quickly, but didn't say anything at all. In fact, 4 or 5 weeks into the approval process, it all looked so bleak that we gave up on Paymill and applied to Braintree. These guys were far more responsive and approved us in a matter of days, but then they also took several weeks to "finalize the setup", so in the end it was a wash between them.

That said, between Braintree and Paymill, BT is certainly playing a catch-up. For one, they just recently dropped minimum monthly fee and switched to simple per-transaction fee structure. Also, their integration requires more work on the backend and overall feels less transparent and "heavier" that Paymill's.

In retrospect, Paymill is not bad at all, but it is not dramatically better than others either. They are all about the same.

FWIW, probably the better option is to use proxy systems like SudoPay so that we can have zero downtime if anything gets blocked for any reasons.

It's worse than being long. It's kafkian hell. In our case, our Paymill onboarding support contact disappeared for three weeks, then misplaced the physical copies of the documents. Three months later, with the banking approval process still on square one, I gave up and went with PayPal + Reference Transactions.

One big difference between the two is that from what I understand is that with Stripe you use a shared merchant account where as with Paymill everyone get's their own. This explains why with Stripe you can be approved in minutes where as Paymill can take up to a few months at times.

But as an end-user, why should you care if you use a shared merchant account or 'your own'? As long as I can set the name of the business that appears on the card transaction, you're fine. With stripe I could even customize this name. With Paymill, they force you to put http:// in the beginning or some other stupidity...

Would this have any affect on whether issuing banks accept or reject payments?

This part of the process seams especially opaque and I've had far more customers than I would have expected have cards declined for no discernible reason.

I wonder if shared merchant accounts are a plus or minus here.

> One big difference between the two is that from what I understand is that with Stripe you use a shared merchant account where as with Paymill everyone get's their own.

(I work at Stripe.) What it even means to have a "merchant account" is shifting in the industry, so it's hard to be absolutely definitive, but: most of Stripe's transactions run through what would traditionally be designated as regular merchant accounts. At the same time, it's our belief that it shouldn't matter (which is why we don't expose this). There are properties that our users should care about -- that funds are held in their name, that the right thing appears on cardholders' statements, etc. How that's accomplished is an implementation detail that may change over time and which will depend on the payment instrument, country, and so on.

Great reply with just the right amount of transparency, technical detail, and candor. Pretty much what we've come to expect from Stripe :)

The sole advantage Paymill has is that you can make use of it from any EU country. That said my experience with them was horrific. If Stripe continues to expand, I doubt that Paymill will be around in a few years.

Instead of the 10 days approval period they advertised I got hit with almost three months. Some of the delay was caused by Wirecard, the bank they work with. I can sort of relate to that. However the significant delays caused by their own contract manager left me baffled. On average her email replies were delayed by 3 to 4 days. Worse the emails were written without much thought. A slow trickle of unhelpful messages that slowly erodes your hopes.

Was she overworked? Or in need of training, I don't know. But for certain the future is bleak for Paymill, unless they drastically improve the on-boarding process.

So what exactly was "horrific" about the experience?

> Both services are providing solid libraries and gems for every major programming platform like Rails or Node.js.

Laughed out loud at that one. :-D

I am not sure about Stripe since it is not available in our country (Slovenia), but Paymill doesn't allow processing 3rd party payments. Plus it took them 57 days from the day we sent them paper documents (they travel max 5 days to Germany) to respond that they cannot help us (since we do 3rd party processing). I was not impressed by their customer support and look forward to the day when Stripe will become available.

https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses

Just have a look at this list, there are enormous markets which are not served at all by stripe.

I honestly wonder how big these markets are..

  > 17. Bankruptcy lawyers

  > 37. Mail-order brides

> 37. Mail-order brides

As was just pointed out to me, that means mail-order husbands are not forbidden. Just in case anybody was planning on starting a new business.... :)

In all seriousness, some of these other markets are massive industries, but are excluded for good reasons - I recognize a number of them immediately as being disproportionately high targets for fraud and/or chargebacks, which would be prohibitively expensive for Stripe to deal with right now.

There is nothing to compare here. One company has a vision and a goal and the ability to execute on those. The other is a clone. They will always be second, they will always follow through, they will not innovate. That's for most clones.

So? A payment processor is, in many ways, a utility. There's only so much innovation I need out of Stripe - they need to process payments for me. Done. If a competitor is cheaper, it's valid to go for them.

If that is all you see, then you're missing the bigger picture here. You need more than just 'an utility'.

You need trust, competence and support.

They need to be good at everything they do. Usually you won't get that from clones.

Don't get me wrong, there are usually where a clone could be good, but the Samwer Brothers don't do it to be the best.

When shit hits the fan, you want to be sure that Stripe will step up - don't expect that from cheap clones.

You're conflating two things here. I agree that clones more often lack innovation - it's inherent in the way they're made. But there's no automatic correlation that they'll be bad at customer service, or incompetent. There's also no guarantee that the original company will be good at these things.

Put simply, there are times when "the best" isn't necessary, for financial reasons. Particularly when we're talking about payment processors that are literally skimming a percentage of your profit.

Yeah. Ultimately they're both trying to deliver incremental improvements to the developer-friendly full-stack payment platform model that had already been validated by Braintree as an incremental improvement on payment platforms that had been around since before the internet. It's updating an old, unfashionable industry for an audience in a particular part of the world, not making "a game that looks a bit like Foo" or yet another Groupon clone. Being incubated by Rocket Internet doesn't necessarily make you a vastly worse-run company than being incubated by YC.

The difference is the way it took to get where they are, technically speaking. On one side, they chose to architecture their SDKs/APIs in a way for some reasons, after some thinking. And they are going to keep improving on it in a consistent way. Same thing for customer support. On the other side: "Hey, it works for them, let's not think, throw $10M and do the same!", but I don't think it's possible to improve the product when you just rely on the innovation on someone else. Until now, the only valid reason that made people chose Paymill was that they were available in Europe, but Stripe is going to change that soon.

One other good example to show how good rocket internet is: Here is a french website: http://www.adopteunmec.com/ (you can translate it by "adoptaguy.com") And here come RI in Germany: http://www.shopaman.de/, looks familiar?

I'm in the process of integrating with Paymill. I can't say much of the service itself yet, but they are trying to help with the registration process, even calling me when needed. I'm optimistic for now.

Why did you choose them over Stripe?

I didn't, Stripe chose Paymill for me by not being available in my country.

We used Paymill. It blows. Email for more info.

> they are trying to help with the registration process

I thought they were friendly and helpful, and enjoyed talking to their support staff. But I couldn't get my account activated, because of a HUGE amount of bureaucracy involved and the process takes at least 8 weeks(!).

With stripe, there's no help needed in the registration or activation process. I activated my account literally within 5 minutes of signing up.

I wrote a blog post about this, comparing lots of providers I was trying to activate collecting payments with in the last few months - in case anyone's interested - http://blog.gingerlime.com/2014/cutting-through-red-tape-wit...

Paymill is even more expensive than Stripe (as 0.28€ is $0.39), which was already "way too expensive for product whose only value over PayPal seems to be prettier documentation" (especially at the under-$12 price point that most of these digital goods are at, but even at larger points as PayPal will give you bulk pricing on orders-of-magnitude smaller transaction volumes). (I guess maybe with larger transaction ticket pricing the cross-border 1% from PayPal will be higher than the $0.09 fixed-fee different from Paymill? Is that the idea?)

I run a very large adult website and wanted to integrate Stripe as the payment solution for subscriptions but like most payment processors in the United States they refuse to work with adult sites. Ironically PayPal is more accepting than Stripe and DOES work with adult sites (under certain conditions). Stripe on the other hand does not under any circumstances. I know adult websites are taboo, but it's really hard to find a payment solution that is as easy to use as Stripe. Does anyone know if Paymill fills that void?

Depends, but it doesn't seem hopeful - looking at their T&Cs at:

https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/terms-conditions/

Section 9.1 includes, amongst other excluded categories, "Sales of erotic articles". I suppose the only way to get an authoritative answer would be to describe your situation to them, and see whether they'll accommodate you.

Why is it taking Stripe so long to come to EU? Any idea when they will be available across EU?

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