> A wallet isn't the intent. It's almost the opposite!
But isn't that what you just described? Saving your payment details to Stripe (as opposed to just entering your card details like a standard payment processor). Stripe is now essentially a wallet where you store your payment details.
Was it a necessary change to push users out to Stripe to save their payment info? What differentiates that from what was there previously. Was it that the CC info was stored per-domain, rather than per customer across all sites?
To be clear, I think it could be an improvement for a lot of cases - just potentially not mine in particular!
> Checkout was designed to be the fastest way to accept payments, and I think it's now faster
Here's a pretty common scenario that definitely just got more complex to implement: dynamic pricing + instant fulfilment (i.e. selling digital goods online).
So that instantly rules out the "No server-side code" approach. Here's what had to be done in the old version:
1. Import checkout.js
2. User clicks pay + fills out details on Merchant site
3. Merchant js makes a call to Merchant server with Stripe token
4. Merchant server calls Stripe to charge the token
Now:
1. Import checkout.js
2. User clicks pay
3. User has to wait for loading spinner while a Stripe session is generated on the Merchant backend and passed to checkout.js
4. User is pushed out to Stripe website to pay + fills out details
5. Stripe backend calls Merchant webhook
6. Customer redirected to Merchant
7. Merchant server must check with Stripe to see if session was completed and customer has successful purchase.
Overall - that's a more complicated flow for the Merchant to implement, with more room for things to go wrong.
And it's not technically true that the flow will always be faster for users - if the customer had CC details saved in the old version, the flow would have been faster for them (less async calls + no redirect to Stripe).
For a certain segment of Merchant, I think there are definite improvements - but for the one-person operation selling software - PayPal is now the easer to implement option.
But isn't that what you just described? Saving your payment details to Stripe (as opposed to just entering your card details like a standard payment processor). Stripe is now essentially a wallet where you store your payment details.
Was it a necessary change to push users out to Stripe to save their payment info? What differentiates that from what was there previously. Was it that the CC info was stored per-domain, rather than per customer across all sites?
To be clear, I think it could be an improvement for a lot of cases - just potentially not mine in particular!
> Checkout was designed to be the fastest way to accept payments, and I think it's now faster
Here's a pretty common scenario that definitely just got more complex to implement: dynamic pricing + instant fulfilment (i.e. selling digital goods online).
So that instantly rules out the "No server-side code" approach. Here's what had to be done in the old version:
1. Import checkout.js
2. User clicks pay + fills out details on Merchant site
3. Merchant js makes a call to Merchant server with Stripe token
4. Merchant server calls Stripe to charge the token
Now:
1. Import checkout.js
2. User clicks pay
3. User has to wait for loading spinner while a Stripe session is generated on the Merchant backend and passed to checkout.js
4. User is pushed out to Stripe website to pay + fills out details
5. Stripe backend calls Merchant webhook
6. Customer redirected to Merchant
7. Merchant server must check with Stripe to see if session was completed and customer has successful purchase.
Overall - that's a more complicated flow for the Merchant to implement, with more room for things to go wrong.
And it's not technically true that the flow will always be faster for users - if the customer had CC details saved in the old version, the flow would have been faster for them (less async calls + no redirect to Stripe).
For a certain segment of Merchant, I think there are definite improvements - but for the one-person operation selling software - PayPal is now the easer to implement option.