Could someone people explain the appeal of Stripe? The APIs are nice, but so a most other payment providers.
The fee Stripe charges are pretty high. We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price. The fact that you can't change who process you credit card payments (can you?) excludes you from getting any good deals on fees. If you shop around you can save a lot of money.
Honestly getting a merchant account, if that's the excuse for using Stripe, isn't that hard.
>We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price.
Is that really realistic? I thought all credit card transaction fees were percentage, while most ACH is fixed-rate (so if someone is charging you a percentage on ACH, you are getting screwed.)
My wife has a merchant account. It's not that the published "fees" are high -- I think she pays something like 20p / transaction. It's the crazy confusing other charges she has to put up with, like monthly fees which seem to me to be random, bogus insurance changes, hire of the terminal etc etc. It ends up costing a lot, and it's highly opaque.
If stripe has a transparent charging structure, that would be a massive plus to me.
Our total fees for all of the admittedly less than transparent charges never amount to more than 1% each month, and they are proportional to the number of transactions not revenue so that will decrease as we grow.
We pay basically the same % fee for our merchant account (maybe 2.2%), plus per transaction fees for the merchant account, plus an annual fee and per transactions fees to the gateway, plus an annual fee and per transaction fees to our recurring billing provider.
Do you know if you get better rates that the 2.4 / 2.5% Stripe charges, if you choose a different provider?
You could use a company like PayEx, NetAxept, DIBS or ePay ( there are many more of cause ). You pay them a flat fee per transaction, I know at least one of them will do it for a fixed monthly fee and $0.04 per transaction. The you need someone to handle the actual merchant account, someone like Teller, SwedBank, Handelsbank ( again there are many more ). Many of these will process VISA and MasterCard for less than 1% of the amount and in some case a lot less.
Stripe is wonderfully simple, but if you want to process any real amount of credit cards they seem really expensive. For quickly starting up I get why you would go with Stripe.
If you're getting cheaper offers from other providers, you should get in touch with us (support@stripe.com). We can do volume discounts, but we can also just help you compare prices - many other providers have cheaper sticker prices, but because they frequently have other fees, we'll often come out cheaper than you think.
We can do that too! (We can't specifically do SEK yet, although we're working on it - should have it soon)
We've tried to make all of this as easy as possible - you can associate bank accounts in different currencies with your Stripe account. If you make a charge in a currency you have a bank account for, we'll transfer it directly; otherwise we'll convert to your account's default currency and transfer it to that currency's bank account.
We done have some special needs though, so I doubt Stripe is right for us. We need a few more currencies and we expect to have the money transferred without any currency conversion ( If the customer pays in Swedish Kronor, we want the amount transferred to us in that currency ). Also we need support for at least one local card.
It's not meant as a put down or anything, I just fail so see what the big deal is with Stripe.
My company processes around EUR 600-850k a year solely via credit card. It's our third largest payment method, after SEPA (wire transfer within Europe) and direct debit. We use Santander's platform to process credit card payments and pay just under 0.7%. So "yes", you can get better rates, but these numbers come with strings attached such as having the payroll account with them, paying a big bunch of suppliers via them, etc. Nonetheless, the numbers work great for us.
Unless you're ultra low volume I can't see why anybody would pay a percentage rate when you can use something like SagePay and pay 10p per transaction. It would be an order of magnitude more expensive to use this for us, so what have I missed?
My other half's business uses Sagepay for online payments (for which we pay a flat £25 a month - or about 3p per transaction) against merchant services (where card fees are paid) through GlobalPayments into an HSBC business account.
We have just under a thousand transactions a month for totals just into five figures, both in store and online, and we pay around £140 a month in fees. As a proportion it's not gone over 1% of the total in the last year. That covers _everything_, including card fees, online fees, the instore pdq machine, support etc. Only a small proportion of transactions are credit cards, most by far is debit.
It's not a straight comparison with Stripe, because Stripe doesn't provide any of the instore stuff.
What appeal ought Stripe to have to us? Why would we pay 2.4%? Genuine questions.
I have noticed very cheap quotes before that will then say plus interchange. Interchange is what the card companies charge the provider and you are probably looking at about .6% average just through those.
The fee Stripe charges are pretty high. We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price. The fact that you can't change who process you credit card payments (can you?) excludes you from getting any good deals on fees. If you shop around you can save a lot of money.
Honestly getting a merchant account, if that's the excuse for using Stripe, isn't that hard.