
Pay Pad for Stripe - jamesjyu
http://pay-pad.com/
======
rubergly
Stripe gets a lot of love here on HN, and it's almost universally praised as
having no faults and being better than Paypal in every single way. And yet I
never see anyone discuss the experience for users. I actually really like the
ability to use Paypal on a site to pay without entering my credit card
information to yet another source of potential hacking. If a site that allowed
Paypal payments moved to Stripe, I would actually find that frustrating and
inconvenient. Developers seem quick to praise Stripe as perfect because it
does seem to be close to that in the facet they deal with (on the development
and merchant end); I understand that developers save a ton more time by
switching to Stripe than users lose by having to enter their payment
information, but your users really shouldn't have to be concerned with that
detail. That being said, I do really like Stripe, but I worry that they'll
grow complacent and never expand into the user-facing features because the
huge success they've had in other aspects means no one is really pushing them
to grow into those areas.

~~~
citricsquid
I wonder if people are often scared of Paypal, even after it's become so
entrenched in online payments. I would think the process for the _average_
user (regardless of payment system used) is:

1\. Do I want to purchase from this website 2\. Do I trust this website to
provide my payment info to it

 _If_ they use Stripe, there is no real "signal" that it is Stripe, the user
thinks it is part of the website, the website they have already decided to
trust. If a user answers yes to 1 and 2 with Stripe then they will purchase.
With Paypal there is another step:

3\. Do I trust Paypal to provide my payment info to it?

The user first has to trust the website and then trust Paypal, whereas with
Stripe they only have to trust the website (because they don't know what
Stripe is, and as long as they remain on the website they assume it's the same
thing). So there is an extra step that the user can be turned off at, even if
only 1 in 10 people answer yes to 1 and 2 but then no to 3 it can be
significant.

Might be a crazy theory... but it seems plausible. Although at the same time
quite a lot of people (my parents for example) trust Paypal and any website
that uses Paypal, so it could be the case that the value of the Paypal brand
negates the customer loss of people that have never heard of Paypal and decide
they don't trust it.

~~~
simonbrown
I trust Paypal more than most websites. They take steps like using SSL site-
wide (with HSTS) and X-Frame-Options, for example, which a lot of e-commerce
websites don't. Of course, this is negated if the user doesn't trust Paypal,
or doesn't understand what it does.

Website owners probably dislike the loss in branding when using Paypal, which
makes them look less professional.

~~~
omarchowdhury
The best option might be have a branded checkout using Stripe, and an option
to pay with PayPal for those who maintain PayPal accounts.

~~~
billycoover
Not a bad idea. As a site owner, I prefer to have my checkout branded as my
site. I'm not a fan of the paypal experience. It feels cheap. However I
certainly understand that people prefer paypal over stripe or other payment
systems. To say "use our checkout system, or pay with paypal" would be fine if
the site owner wants to support it.

I've had a lot of people ask about integrating other payment platforms into
Pay Pad. I'd love to build Pay Pad in a way that was platform agnostic. Just
choose your payment provider/gateway and you're off.

We'll see what happens. If enough people want it, I'll do it I'm sure.

~~~
Negitivefrags
We launched with both Paypal and Stripe. Over about 70,000 transactions it has
been an almost exact 50/50 split between the two payment methods.

I can't say for sure how many people would not have paid only given one of
those options, but I'm sure it's a non trivial number.

------
ChrisNorstrom
WTF, Jesus what is up with all these professional websites with simple
Alignment problems?! It's driving me crazy. Pay-Pad's header, body and footer
are all different widths and unaligned.

Since so many "Show HN" sites have alignment problems I promise I'll write an
article specifically to tackle them. For now just look at the 5th picture here
and you'll get it: [http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/05/quick-fix-up-
redesign-o...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/05/quick-fix-up-redesign-of-
tap11-com/)

The Pay-Pad logo text is 9px off to the left. Body is 54px wider than the
header, making the body very noticeably jut out to the right by 63px. The
element with "Developers love Stripe for its super simple API..." is 31 pixels
too much to the right. The white-space gutters are so massive they're
distracting to the eyes. And of course the worst design fad in 2010+ (other
than the "everything is grey" (which I'm guilty of)) is the checkboard
image+text layout. It's such a professional looking app (and VERY useful) but
the website.. I almost can't take it seriously. I don't mean to hit on just
Pay-Pad I've seen a lot of this lately. Little mistakes that shouldn't exist.
It's driving me crazy.

~~~
whalesalad
You'll definitely want to avoid looking at the site of the developer, then:
<http://coovtech.com/about>

Gotta admit, the guy may lack all design sense, but at least he's shipping
software!

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Very true. And shipping software is what matters. I've noticed the best
programmers almost always lack design sense. They don't think in design, they
think in code. While really good designers are code-phobic and see programming
as babble. It's hard for them to visualize code.

~~~
billycoover
Thanks for the feedback!

------
zbowling
unfortunate domain name. paypad.com seems to be a competitor. probably should
do a trademark search before you get too settled on it.

------
pspeter3
Access to your Stripe account information is cool but I can't imagine anyone
filling out their credit card information on your iPad. It sounds awkward and
difficult compared to the Square reader.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Why would it be any different than the Square iPad app? I've been using that
and entering people's credit card information for transactions and no one has
had a problem with that. The feedback has been very positive.

~~~
pspeter3
Most of my experience with Square has been using the card reader. It feels
more seamless

------
highace
Massively risky. It always is when your proposition is 100% reliant on someone
else's with no promises or contracts. What happens if Stripe suddenly say no
(a la Padmapper), or they make their own? Just saying.

~~~
geofft
I didn't get the impression he's trying to make a living off this or anything.
I just thought he decided to make something cool based on the Stripe API, and
if they make their own, all the better. Whatever happened to making things
because they were fun instead of because they had a good value proposition?

------
Kilimanjaro
Stripe may be a cool idea right now, but it won't survive a better pay-by-
phone alternative without external devices.

You need my money? I'll tap an app, enter the amount to send, enter the
receiver's id and presto, the transaction shows in the receiver's
phone/desktop app as completed.

Somebody will crack it, and he will be the next king of the hill.

* Even though I was confused with 'Square' and their card swiping device, the premise of a mobile payment app still applies to the web. In the future your phone will be your wallet.

~~~
jurre
I think you're mistaking stripe, which handles online payments, for square,
which accepts mobile payments with an external device.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Yep, sorry about that.

------
citizens
Searching for "paypad" results in a "did you mean paypal?" Of course,
searching for "pay pad" works just fine.

I downloaded the free version because I don't need to create or charge
customers from the app. A couple of things that would motivate me to pay:

• Graphs

• Payment forecasting for recurring payments ($X expected this week, month,
etc.)

• Multiple accounts. Not a big deal, but if I could easily switch between
stripe accounts [without re-logging in] I would.

Looks like a nice app though; thanks for putting this out there.

~~~
billycoover
These are all on my short list :)

To do #1 and #2 require a larger backend system. I've been building that
system for the last couple weeks...

Stripe allows you to pull 100 records at a time via the API, so what I've done
is combined the API with WebHooks. I use the API to fetch historical data, and
webhooks to capture anything new. To be clear, this is not part of Pay Pad
today, rather it's part of another set of products I've got cooking.

I hope to launch some of these things over the next month.

regarding the multi-account... I started with that. I have 7 Stripe accounts
and it was important that I have easy access to all of them. About halfway
through the development of Pay Pad, I switched to OAuth and had to take the
multi-account support out because the way I was doing it was not a good fit.

I'll add it back at some point. I'm just working on a way to make that process
intuitive. I want it to be one or two taps at the most.

