

Why We Switched From Stripe To Balanced - whather
https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced

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meritt
This article really should be titled "Why we chose Balanced over BancBox."

Stripe quite simply wasn't the service they needed and they made a mistake in
initial selection. This article title implies that Balanced is "better" than
Stripe when they are quite different services entirely.

~~~
jusben1369
Well they were using Stripe and then switched to Balanced. So I don't think
the title is misleading. It's short and factual. Maybe they could have added
("Hint: Disbursements")

~~~
omonra
They could also have subscribed to the New York Times and then realized that
it doesn't solve the problem they have.

Is Balanced better than NYT?

~~~
petsos
Did they say Balanced is better than Stripe?

~~~
weareconvo
I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous, but that's what the title is
intended to imply.

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mjallday
> Integrating billing into an app used to be a pain in the ass. I remember
> integrating BrainTree into a previous startup back in 2008, and it was a
> four month long process. Applying for a merchant account to even start
> accepting credit card payments took at least three months to get approved.

This is a massive win. I remember trying to setup payments and begin rejected
several times by Worldpay and this was a process that took several months and
required us to keep funds in escrow. Ultimately we settled on PayPal
integration which required sending customers off to paypal.com and hoping they
went through with it.

I'd love to see some case-studies in terms of conversion rates for completing
transactions when it comes to keeping customers on site to do payments versus
sending them to a 3rd party.

~~~
damoncali
For what it's worth, that is not my experience. Setting up a merchant account
with Braintree is a pain (but far less of one than going through a typical
broker). It took me less than three weeks, most of which was spent waiting.

And the Braintree API is almost as good as Stripe's, if not equally good (it
lagged a couple years ago, but they've been catching up). Stripe is a little
bit slicker in my view, but not dramatically so. For normal stuff, your'e not
going to see a huge difference in development time - certainly less than a
man-month with either provider.

I eventually switched to Stripe because it was cheaper at low volumes (this
was important to my project since it was bootstrapped), simpler, and they
never asked for a personal guarantee. But it wasn't a huge difference
operationally. Both companies provide very good support and are perfectly
acceptable.

Both are miles ahead of Auth.net and Paypal, which are pretty horrible.

~~~
obviouslygreen
While everything practically useful almost always takes longer than almost
anyone thinks it possibly could, I'm curious about some of the times I've seen
in this discussions lately.

Honest question: What is it about Stripe (picking this one specifically due to
having used it) that would take a month of work? Their documentation is
thorough but -- at least last time I used it -- totally lacking in examples,
so patching together a server-side workflow for creating and charging against
profiles took a couple days of on-and-off work, but a month? I can see this if
it includes other development on the project, but as far as actually getting
the relevant parts of the API integrated and working, I'm wondering if other
people's experience has been vastly different with this.

~~~
damoncali
I've done two stripe implementations and one Braintree. None took more than a
week of coding and that's being generous. Although I imagine if you had a
really complex system, you could take a while.

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icelancer
Huh. Balanced offers same-day payouts to Wells Fargo bank accounts and next-
day to others if it's before 3 PM PST. I love Stripe, but I hate the 7 day
rolling period. I use Square for my in-person transactions and get the money
the next day. Why can't Stripe do this?

I wonder if Balanced has good integration with the third-party shopping carts
out there...

~~~
dangrossman
> Why can't Stripe do this?

There's much higher fraud risk with online card payments than in-person ones.
There's both risk that the customer presenting the card number isn't the
cardholder, and risk that the merchant is itself a fraudster trying to charge
stolen cards, launder money, or accomplish some other illegal act on the
network.

Traditional merchant accounts mitigate some of that risk through an extensive
underwriting process. Stripe does not have such a process. The only way they
can mitigate the risk is by identifying patterns in transaction activity and
getting chargebacks/disputes from cardholders. The 7 day period gives them
sufficient time to identify the patterns and receive early disputes before the
money leaves their control.

~~~
icelancer
...

But Balanced offers this.

~~~
dangrossman
Do they? Balanced Payouts offers same-day ACH. Do funds captured from credit
cards with Balanced Payments instantly enter a balance to fund an outgoing ACH
with Balanced Payouts? Credit card transactions don't settle instantly,
they're typically batched nightly M-F. I would be surprised to hear they let
you withdraw money they don't even have in hand yet.

~~~
icelancer
[12:58] <kyleb_> Do you offer next-day payouts for credit card purchases?

[12:58] <@jacobolus> kyleb_: yes, assuming I'm understanding you correctly

[12:59] <@jacobolus> kyleb_: payouts go to bank accounts, and are next
business day or same-day with wells fargo bank accounts

[12:59] <kyleb_> I think so. Customer purchases $100 worth of things using a
Visa on the website at noon PST. Those funds are disbursed to a bank account
via ACH on the next day?

[12:59] <@jacobolus> kyleb_: yep

[12:59] <kyleb_> OK perfect. I wasn't sure if it was bank payments only that
were processed next-day, or if credit cards were processed as well next-day

[12:59] <kyleb_> Thanks a lot!

------
obviouslygreen
At my last consultancy I heard great things about BrainTree with Python...
however, that was someone else's baby, and I've only ever worked with
Auth.net, Stripe, and some awful processors that are better left undiscussed.
Stripe is hands-down the easiest.

If Balanced is that easy _and_ enables escrow-style payments, that's pretty
brilliant. Will definitely be looking into it for future projects.

------
vampirechicken
Hey Balanced, many of your competitors have rolling payouts and/or reserve
requirements due to the risk of refunds and chargebacks.

How and why are you willing to float that risk?

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jeffasinger
Why not just batch all your payouts daily and do ACH with your bank for
payouts? Costs us $17/mo and takes 5min no matter how many payouts we need per
day by uploading a file to our bank.

~~~
mjallday
I bet your bank has a great API for this as well :)

Balanced abstracts away this batching process and giving you events and nice
json objects to deal with rather than parsing the batch file that eventually
gets returned.

You could make the same argument for the card processing, if you _really
really_ wanted to you could bypass Balanced/WePay/Braintree/whoever and deal
directly with the bank but for most people your time is better spent getting
on with your core business.

~~~
jeffasinger
Yep, there's no API really, just creating a file in a specific format, and
uploading it to the bank after logging in. Balanced is definitely easier.

The security conscious part of me also likes that there's human, offline
intervention before money leaves my bank account.

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nnq
How hard would it be for all the PSPs out there to standardize on one API,
maintaining of course the ability to add proprietary extension to it? There's
a shitload of _the most boring work on Earth_ to do for integrating with
each... I remember using the PayPal api time ago and even that was _hell_...
and no matter how good an API is designed, it's still hell because it's
_another_ one to integrate with... Can't we make something like w3c for
payment systems?

~~~
jzwinck
If an existing provider's API became the standard, the other providers would
rightly complain. If a standard were made from whole cloth, then, you know:
<http://xkcd.com/927/>

~~~
nnq
As always, xkcd is right :) ...but there's a difference between "no standard"
and "one standard for each implementation", subtle as it may be. Nobody will
adopt a competitor's standard, so there has to be a common standard pushed
from the outside.

~~~
jareau
Payswarm is a w3c affiliated universal payment standard. It hasn't taken off
yet, but is a pretty compelling concept.

<http://payswarm.com/> <http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/>

------
fatbat
I too, looked at both BrainTree and Balanced and decided on Balanced. However
I liked that BrainTree seemed to focus more on the international part of
payments.

~~~
cristinacordova
Cristina from Stripe here.

Stripe just launched in beta in the UK and is available in Canada as well,
whereas I believe Balanced is only available to users in the U.S.

Many customers with international buyers and sellers have opted to use our
Stripe Connect product for that reason: <https://stripe.com/connect>

------
dangoldin
We were actually looking to implement Stripe and didn't see a simple way of
handling disbursements. Thanks for sharing the experiences with Balanced.

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robglas
You only briefly mentioned PayPal, but I'm genuinely curious; did you look
into PayPal Adaptive Preapproved Payments (optionally with the embedded flow
as seen here:
[https://www.x.com/sites/default/files/paypal/imported/lightb...](https://www.x.com/sites/default/files/paypal/imported/lightbox3.jpg))?
If so, why did you decide this was not for you?

------
showkhill
Did you look at Stripe Apps?

I was thinking escrow for my startup originally but stripe apps offer a
different approach - i.e. cash goes straight from tenant to customer with fees
(including a handling fee paid to you) deducted directly from the tenant.

It's a nice alternative to a straight-up escrow setup.

~~~
cristinacordova
Cristina from Stripe here. Thanks for the comment.

Many marketplaces want to avoid the liability for transactions that take place
on their platform. This is specifically why we built Stripe Connect
(<https://stripe.com/connect>). It allows the marketplace to provide a way to
accept payments to their sellers. The buyers and sellers can the transact with
each other and the marketplace avoids liability.

Balanced provides the ability to pass disputes onto the seller, but the
marketplace ultimately has full liability for chargebacks, fraud, and so on.

With Stripe Connect, each seller is responsible for charges run through their
own Stripe account. This removes any liability from the marketplace, and is
really useful if you want to purely be a platform of facilitating payments and
don’t actually want to be involved in the risk and complexity of handling any
of the money.

~~~
javier_dev
How does it work with Stripe connect if the marketplace wants to get a small
cut/fee from the payment?

Example: Buyer pays $10, seller gets $9, marketplace gets $1.

~~~
amfeng
Yep, you can do that easily with application fees
(stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees).

The money from the credit card payment gets routed to your seller
automatically (and we split off the application fee to send to your Stripe
account). You never touch the rest of the funds, so you're never responsible
for any chargebacks or refunds.

------
tomlu
I can only imagine BrainTree was different in 2008. I just integrated
BrainTree into a two-platform system. It took the team a week, most of which
was integrating with our order system and doing the UI. The API itself is very
pleasant in my opinion.

------
josh2600
A couple thoughts:

I really like the layout of the blog. It's nice looking and clean.

The other comments about choosing the wrong tool are apt, but it's also true
that this is a part of the payments business. Stripe can choose to do the
sorts of holds and escrows these folks are looking for, or not, but I do think
Stripe is particularly easy to integrate.

I think this piece is really trying to articulate the grouptalent business
model to developers and it comes off pretty well to my mind.

~~~
whather
Thanks josh!

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jusben1369
I'd be curious to know: Why not have developers have a Stripe account and
charge $8K and you charge $2K and exit the escrow business altogether?

~~~
dangrossman
The escrow is one of the core value props of the business. They're arranging
development contracts for various companies. The developers know they aren't
working for a deadbeat that won't pay after the work is completed, because the
company already paid GT before they started work. The company knows it's not
paying developers that will skip out without turning in the work product,
because the developers aren't paid until after they do the work.

Aside from that, paying two parties for every contract introduces friction.
Multiple payments means more work, more manager approvals, more reimbursements
for the company card, etc. Some portion of the customers would simply choose
not to use the service because of that added complexity; it'd be lost
business.

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ricardobeat
Bad timing? Stripe announced their Connect platform for marketplaces last
October: <https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect>

~~~
dangrossman
The post covered why Stripe Connect wasn't appropriate.

~~~
cristinacordova
Cristina from Stripe here.

There are a few major differences between Stripe Connect and Balanced. Amber
from our team details them here: [http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-
Balanced-compare-agai...](http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-
compare-against-Stripe/answer/Amber-Feng?srid=hfZ&share=1)

------
dxbydt
From the article - >Mollie, GroupTalent's Director of Happiness,...

Ok, I get you want to be hip and all, but Mollie will someday apply for like a
real job in the real world, and the company will look at her resume and go
"Director of Happiness...very pretentious, are the rest of us Directors of
Misery or what...", and that resume meets the shredder.

Why not give Mollie a real, you know, non-vacuous title ?

~~~
whather
She gave herself that title, and rocks it :). Her not-so-fancy title is
Account Manager.

