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Comment by jqueryin | Hacker News Reader

This is great news for those using Stripe Checkout. Are there any plans to offer Alipay to Stripe customers who are utilizing the API for subscriptions, invoicing, and recurred payments?

As an aside, we also get a load of client requests for PayPal as an alternative simply because many people don't have a US-based credit card. If you're making the moves to support global markets, it's tough to side step them.

I really wish PayPal brought back their digital credit card which you could preload with cash and use online like a real credit/debit card. It would solve all of our problems with users who don't have a CC!

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(I work at Stripe.)

The Alipay integration with Checkout works just like Stripe.js, in that it will return a token that you can charge instantly, or attach to a customer and utilize for subscription, invoicing and recurring payments.

Which is amazing. Serious kudos for making it so darn easy. Once you have a token, you no longer have to care what the original payment method was. Absolutely how it should be.

Thanks for the response. To narrow down the scope of my question a bit: Do you have any plans to open up API endpoints that would afford us the privilege of choosing a gateway on our own?

I'm asking because our checkout is completely devoid of Checkout or Stripe.js, i.e. the "building the whole payment form" route you mention on the checkout page: https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/forms.

Are you asking if you can bring your own payment gateway for use with Stripe? (Sorry, I was thrown off by the payment form tutorial reference.)

No, just whether or not you'd implement Alipay into your API in a manner that would allow for us to handle the frontend UI ourselves (letting our users chose between Alipay or credit card).

We felt that Checkout was the best integration point because it let us do some nice dynamic authentication logic instead of Alipay's usual redirect-based flow. Given that subtleties involved, Alipay's constraints, and the fact that it'll no doubt need to evolve in the future (as compared to the static standardization of credit cards), I think it'd be pretty tough to expose it via a straight API.

That makes sense. Given the fact Checkout simply returns a token, I think it's safe to say that it can still work with existing backend API solutions in conjunction with webhooks.

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