
How John and Patrick Collison Built Stripe - piyushmakhija
http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/01/04/cashiers-of-the-internet/
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zekevermillion
I've used Dwolla for my own payments before they decided to focus on merchant
accounts. Pretty good experience with them, and I wonder how they compare to
Stripe today. I'm always suspicious of such over-hyped services as Stripe, and
wished that there was more of a focus on describing the features and
technology rather than trying to make everything into a human interest story.
Yeah, the Collisons are interesting and successful guys, no doubt. Is Stripe
actually a better service on merit? I really don't know, nor does this article
enlighten me on that front. It really gives no basis for answering the
question in its headline, other than pointing to the precocious financial
success of the founders.

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nthj
> over-hyped

For the past 5-6 years or so I've been working extensively with Stripe,
Braintree, WePay, and PayPal, on a number of different eCommerce and
marketplace platforms. Some supported only one of these gateways, other
platforms I've been heavily involved with support each of those 4 gateways in
parallel depending on their merchants' needs.

Stripe wins, hands-down, for the best documentation and well-thought-out API
architecture. It's not even fair to call it a race, they're so far ahead.
Braintree has caught up a fair bit over the years, but they're still nowhere
near Stripe's level, and now that they're owned by PayPal I don't really
expect them to ever get there. (As an aside, I also had a pretty frustrating
experience with Braintree back in the day because they took too long to
support card tokenization, and one client had no feasible way to only charge
the customer once inventory was secured. Lame customer experience.)

WePay is doing some cool stuff, but, as one example, their ruby SDK gem is a
100-line thin wrapper around the core Net::HTTP library, which means I have to
dig pretty heavily into both their documentation and Ruby's various Net::HTTP
exceptions to safely handle errors, whereas Stripe has all of this built into
their ruby gem out of the box.

My time is limited, and I'd much rather invest it towards designing great
customer experiences than reading and understanding lacking documentation.
Stripe is the only platform I've seen that gets that their documentation is
their product. If the price is I'm on an over-hyped platform, I'm okay with
that. :)

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zekevermillion
Thanks, they should interview you or someone with your experience actually
using the product when writing these articles!

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leesalminen
We approached Stripe with several million/mo in processing across hundreds of
merchants. The rate they offered us was almost as laughable as 2.9%+30c.

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kennethologist
Who did you use instead?

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leesalminen
We worked out a very good deal with CardConnect (ISO of First Data) after
looking into becoming our own ISO.

Their docs aren't as good as Stripe, but there is greater functionality
available. Overall, I'm satisfied.

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jblake
With that kind of volume, you should go straight to a big bank - like Chase
Paymentech or First Data - and getting interchange plus rates. Then you can
plug your merchant account into whatever gateway you want that has the best
API docs, such as Authorize.net or Braintree (I don't think Stripe supports
bringing your own merchant account). Curious why you went with an ISO? Risk-
related - TPPA maybe? True that ISO's are usually willing to take on more risk
than the big guys.

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CardFellow
Couple things - Chase Paymentech and First Data are processors, not banks. I'd
be careful going to banks for processing, because it tends to be among the
most expensive and opaque you can get. (Bank of America and Wells Fargo both
have merchant processing divisions, and are among the worst solutions most
businesses can choose.)

Interchange plus is definitely the pricing model that most businesses want to
be on (and it's actually not limited to high volume businesses - plenty of
small merchants can get it, too) but be aware that by itself, interchange plus
isn't a silver bullet. It really needs to be a true pass-through model, where
you pay the true costs of interchange and assessments. Otherwise, you could
still get overcharged. Mercury Payments, for example, charges with
"interchange plus" but has now been sued twice for overcharging on
assessments. Basically they padded the costs of assessments while trying to
make it look like those were the costs charged by the card brands.

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justjimmy
Still waiting for new the dashboard…almost a year now :( And how I wish Stripe
allows non automatic deposit, keeps the money in the currency it was paid in
and peer to peer transfers! One can hope…

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pc86
Without knowing anything about how Stripe is built on the back end, I imagine
there are probably some architectural issues baked into the automated deposits
that would be a significant undertaking to get rid of.

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AdmiralAsshat
I wouldn't consider being called "The Paypal of the Mobile Era" a compliment.

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jacquesm
If you think of paypal as 'the easy to use payment service provider' then it
makes good sense and it is a compliment.

The merchant issues that some of us dealing with PayPal are facing is of no
concern. Just like being called the 'google of X' does not immediately link
with supremely bad customer service. It's a short-hand, nothing more.

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BinaryResult
Does anyone turn off adblocker after they put in this gateway? I just stopped
reading forbes instead.

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estefan
Works fine with scriptblock installed as well.

