
Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I've Made to Date - DanLivesHere
http://www.centernetworks.com/stripe-from-paypal-google-checkout
======
antimora
Initially I misread the title - I thought it was a mistake to move to Stripe.

~~~
masonhensley
It also happened to me and about 70% of the other overworked peeps reading HN
right now.

~~~
OoTheNigerian
I just woke up and I still misread it.

The title needs editing.

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saurik
This author understands that PayPal offers this service, but does not explain
why, despite seemingly being positive about their past experiences with
PayPal, they opted for Stripe instead; the factors they actually considered
would have been very interesting: without it the article lacks.

I am also curious why their list of alternatives was so short... no Chase
Paymentech? no Litle & Co? There are numerous players in this space that
handle large clients, not just the three being compared here. The article only
states that they did research, and ended up with that list. :(

~~~
moses1400
hi - I decided not to post the entire list in that bulleted list because it
would be too long but I can assure you I did look into a lot of providers
including Chase - I plan to post about all of that in another post hopefully
next week. Thanks for reading the post and giving me your feedback.

I think one of the big factors in going with Stripe over PP Payments Pro was
the strong technical side that Stripe offers.

~~~
saurik
Interestingly, that is the reason I would go with PayPal over Stripe. Stripe's
API is touted as "awesome", but I see no way to automatically reconcile
chargebacks (the word "chargeback" isn't even present in their API
documentation), and their "webhooks" feature is explicitly missing the
critical functionality of "retry if the server failed the response" (making it
totally useless to rely on: you are going to have to drop to polling to trust
your data). I would thereby additionally be very curious to know what
technical factors you found lacking with PayPal in relation to Stripe.

~~~
dangrossman
Is there a traditional merchant account provider that has an API for
chargebacks? I've actually never come across that anywhere but PayPal; maybe
it's more common with 3rd party providers since they already need to connect
chargebacks with their online service just to attribute the fees to the right
user.

~~~
saurik
The other service I have been looking a lot at recently is Litle & Co, which
has even better chargeback support than PayPal: they offer the ability to not
just reconcile but fully automatically respond to chargebacks, complete with
APIs for uploading documentation such as shipping invoices.

I do not know if you (or anyone) would count them as a "traditional merchant
account provider", however (or if they are really a "merchant account
provider" at all; I will be honest and say I'm still behind on some of these
terms).

(Also, for completeness: Amazon Flexible Payments, in a similar boat to PayPal
and thereby falling under the same "already need" reason you list, also has
good mechanisms for automatic chargeback reconciliation and reporting.)

~~~
Fuma
The payments space gets confusing. There are gateway providers that serve
merchants yet process payments through an underlying provider. At the end of
the day there are multiple types of companies which can serve your needs.

I am bias since I work at Litle & Co. My team implemented the chargeback
upload API years back, it's great to see it catching on.

Litle has some neat features including a JavaScript API for tokenization that
we call Pay Page.

I won't go on self promoting, however I can answer questions if you have them.
I follow hacker news because of my personal interest in software development.

------
alapshah
Really quickly, this guy has clearly not researched the field. We (I do
contract work for a large e-commerce business that does 8 figures USD a month
and have a side recurring saas company that will do 5 figures a month in Jan).
We looked at Litle, Braintree, Stripe, and Samurai. We quickly eliminated
Stripe because it's expensive and then had an RFP for the other guys. For my
contract job, Samurai ended up winning out over Litle and Braintree (Ended up
being between Litle and Samurai in the end). I can't recommend the FeeFighters
guys highly enough... I worked with them on my contract gig and ended up using
them for my side project too. They have a fantastic API -
<http://samurai.feefighters.com/developers> and were just great to work with.
For my contract job (big bureaucratic company) we just tokenized ~a million
credit cards with them and have shifted about half of our transactions that
way.

Stripe is _way_ better than paypal. It is also _really_ expensive. Unless you
are a hobby website, I wouldn't give it much thought, except for something to
grow up out of. For real businesses, I think the flexibility afforded by a
real merchant account plus gateway (Braintree, Litle, or Samurai) is worth a
lot.

~~~
Fuma
Did the Samurai API have much weight in the decision making process? I
understand if you can't share details here publically. I work for Litle and we
are always interested in feedback we can use to improve our offerings.

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PhrosTT
Seems odd these two Stripe stories get frontpaged back to back.

~~~
angryasian
agree, I'm extremely skeptical to have two pro stripe articles.. and this one
claiming that users don't understand paypal or google wallets. I mean who
really cares if they switch to Braintree, Stripe, or some other service, what
really matters if the conversions of users entering their credit card vs users
using Google wallet and paypal. I feel like Stripe's marketing team is at work
here.

~~~
saikat
For what it's worth, we don't have a marketing team currently and, no, these
articles are definitely not ones that we made.

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jianshen
I just went to the CloudContacts order page and seeing that I type my credit
card info straight on that page scared me. I'm pretty sure it's because I'm an
engineer but even if it said "Powered by Stripe", I'd still be suspicious...

I was really hoping I wouldn't react that way because I like what Stripe is
doing.

~~~
dangrossman
I agree, and that's where I start looking for the PayPal button.

It doesn't have to be one payment processor or the other -- many major
ecommerce retailers, and you, too! can have a credit card form on site and a
PayPal button on the page to skip it.

I offer it on all my sites and >50% choose PayPal, both for one-off payments
and subscriptions.

<http://i.imgur.com/NEkG9.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/tocZf.png>

~~~
saurik
The striking realization for me with regards to PayPal usage (and how both
reasonable it is to provide the option, as well as how many people must
actually prefer to use it) was the day I noticed that Apple, a company that
often is described as having the valuable asset "millions of customer's credit
card details on file, ready for one-click purchase of anything on their Mac or
iPhone", actually supports PayPal as a payment option in their iTunes suite.

~~~
brazzy
Note that for an international business, PayPal has the invaluable benefit of
supporting a huge bunch of national payment methods - in many countries, these
are more widespread than credit cards, so if you want to do business with
normal people there (like Apple), you have to support these methods.

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lkrubner
This part is true for my site as well:

> What I found was that a number of customers filled > in our order form, went
> off to Paypal or Google > Checkout, but never completed the order.

On my site, I've made all the numbers public. Over the last 6 months, roughly
25% of people start questions, but then don't pay.

Compare these 2 charts. The first shows the number of paid questions per week:

<http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyQuestionsPerWeek>

and this shows the questions that people started but then never paid for:

[http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerW...](http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerWeek)

I'm guessing that the numbers would improve if we weren't using PayPal, so
next week I'm planning to try to use Stripe.

However, I am sad to say, for making payments I am still stuck with PayPal for
awhile, as I can not see anything else that is so easy. On any given day my
website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50. Right now
I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed
money from my PayPal account. But the payments are usually small. On a normal
night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like
this:

$24

$14

$12

$9

$7

$7

$5

$4

$4

$3

$3

$3

$2

$2

$2

$2

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

I use the PayPal MassPay API. I've looked into other services for sending
payments, such as Payoneer, but none have such wide acceptance as PayPal.

Any suggestions for sending automated payments, other than PayPal?

~~~
moses1400
I think when you are paying OUT, it's important to think about your payees.
Are your payees wanting to use something else? For these small amounts, they
may want paypal and that could be one of the reasons they use you.

I have an affiliate relationship setup with one company - and make about $50 a
month or so - they pay via paypal and that is perfect. I am not sure I would
want to bother with it if they required me to setup a new account with some
other program.

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smackfu
On this order page, the "Confirm My Order" button just seems weird:

<https://www.cloudcontacts.com/order>

Does pressing the button confirm the order, or does pressing the button take
you to a page where you confirm the order?

~~~
moses1400
got some better wording? Clicking that button takes you to a review page where
you see the info then on that page you click to buy.

~~~
crymer11
"Review My Order"

possibly some helper text that says something to the effect of "confirm your
order on the next page"?

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moses1400
I like review my order - thank you for the suggestion

~~~
jamesm2
The unusual aspect to me is that it's on the left side and not the right. It
doesn't feel quite right.

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jpdoctor
OK, I'm pretty sure this is an FAQ but not getting a sensible result from
google: Does anyone have a pointer to a table of processing fees for the major
providers?

~~~
douglasmac
<http://www.billingsavvy.com/>

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nixxle
$15 dollar for every occuring charge-back nomatter what the outcome? Not
thanks.

~~~
Gring
I didn't believe that until I read it myself. It's true:
<https://stripe.com/help/chargebacks>

If your competitor sells $1 eBooks using Stripe, there's an easy way to move
him out of business: buy 10'000, then ask for a chargeback on each of them.

There's got to be a better way to do this.

~~~
lemming
Chargebacks are expensive because it's an extremely manual process, especially
representments - $15 is not outrageous. Many issuers will simply not charge
back small amounts because it's not worth it. If you want to commit fraud,
just buy small amounts at Starbucks on a prepaid card with no balance - they
generally don't auth (to give that smooth consumer experience) and will not
charge back when their forced post comes in because it's not worth it for
them.

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fastspring
You may want to also consider SaaSy.com: \- All-inclusive – hardly any
development work needed - More functionality - GUI-based for the most part -
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