
Stripe in Japan - samber
https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-in-japan
======
nolok
I evaluated stripe for a French company here in Europe, having heard lots of
good things about them, and I have to say that while the integration was top
notch, they were vastly inferior to local bank competitors in two areas : no
support whatsoever for 3D secure (once you've started using it, you never want
to go back), and way higher pricing. National banks (CIC, Caisse d'Epargne)
both offered % way, way lower than stripe (under 0.5% per transaction, stripe
being almost 3* that for European card and 6* that for non European card).

Even including the small monthly fee and the harder / higher cost integration,
it made no sense to go with them.

Was a bit surprised, mostly by the good terms that could be obtained in
locally national banks once you sit with someone. Company I was representing
wasn't very large (12 employees). I wonder what others here have experienced?
Is it a special scenario that never happens, is it usual?

~~~
Vertrauen
> 3D secure

As a customer, I hate 3D secure. When I get that shit thrown at me, I often
just head over to Amazon and buy the same item there. Even if it is more
expensive.

Reasons:

The 3D Secure form always looks so unprofessional it makes me shiver.

It often is loaded in an iframe so it could come from god knows where.

Often it plain out does not work. It aborts the transaction with "Transaction
aborted" or something like that with no further info. So I sit there thinking
"Uhm.. what now? Is my password wrong or what?".

Why would I input even _more_ of my data into your damn form? The more data I
give you, the easier you can mess with me. Now my CC card number and
verification number is not enough anymore. Now you want my 3D "secure"
password. What do you want next?

~~~
stephenr
I've used it via "verified by visa" with two banks in two countries.

In both cases, there is a custom phrase that I provide the bank, which is then
provided on the 3D-secure page where i enter the sms OTP.

Honestly so long as they show me the phrase I gave them, I couldn't give two
shits if it looks like it was designed in 2002, at least that keeps it
consistent with the rest of their online banking page styles.

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po
We (at MakeLeaps) integrated Stripe as an option in our SaaS product for small
businesses in Japan pretty much as soon as it became available in beta. Our
users can send Japanese invoices and have them paid through Stripe. We just
flipped on multi-currency support when they launched it in beta and it was
done in a day.

They've been rolling out features to close the gap in functionality with the
US product and working really closely with us. Daniel and their team has been
great to work with and having local support staff is really important in this
market. So yeah, we're fans.

Compared to how difficult it can be for our customers to get up and running
with other payment providers and how quickly they can get paid out, Stripe has
the potential to be a big influence on the payments space in Japan.

BTW, if you know anyone running a business in Japan and want a bilingual back-
office that is easily integrated with Stripe, just look us up!

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nicolas_t
Quick stats about credit card usage in Japan for people interested.

In Tokyo, most shops and restaurants accept credit card. In other cities
(including Kyoto and Osaka), only about 30% of restaurants or smaller shops
accept credit card. Chain store and department store usually accept credit
cards, it's just the small mom and pop shop that are taking some time. The
situation is improving fast though.

Online, I have a friend managing an ecommerce there with about 400 million
dollar sales per year. Right now, 40% of the orders are cash on delivery. It
was 60% of the orders three years ago.

Credit card is hard to get for foreigners (like usual) and for young people
without stable jobs (banks tend to be rather risk averse).

I'm happy that Stripe is in Japan because the existing credit card providers
are mostly incompetent and have really stupid apis.

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neximo64
When will it be 2 day settlement in the EU like it is in the US. I don't get
how competitors can do it and yet stripe still holds off.

~~~
Aeolun
Can't you request them to do that anyway? That said, I still don't understand
why this is so relevant to a business?

~~~
halomru
Getting your money later means that your you are effectively giving out a free
loan to whoever is holding your money. For you that's an opportunity cost
because you can't reinvest the money for some period of time.

If your expenses have to be paid before you get your money this can also be a
cash flow issue (or make a cash flow issue worse), when a peak in demand
leaves you very profitable but unable to pay your bills because you're waiting
for your money to arrive.

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jfim
Isn't Japan mostly cash-based? Seems like an interesting location to expand
to.

~~~
fenomas
Japan is mostly cash-based for face-to-face transactions.

Online, users are extremely comfortable paying electronically. You have to
remember that paying via mobile was a thing here several years before the rest
of the world, so people have had longer to acclimatize.

As a reference point, Japan spent around $8B via mobile phones in 2006 (i.e.
before the iphone launched).

~~~
digi_owl
Best i recall a large part about this was that the carriers had their own
banks that could issue credit cards that was linked to the phone.

~~~
fenomas
They may well have done for legal reasons, but the point for consumers was
that you could find a product in a web page and hit purchase, and the cost
would just show up as a line item in your phone bill, without any signups or
credit card numbers.

Similar deal with NFC payments. They launched here in 2004, and were fairly
widespread by the time smartphones arrived. It used to be very common for
people to move "up" to a smartphone and then be surprised to find out how many
features they'd given up.

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euske
> ANA (the largest airline in Japan)

Just nitpicking here but for marketing-wise, I think this is a rather unwise
wording.

ANA is one of the two biggest airline companies in Japan, but they only became
so in 2014, and it's fairly questionable if they can stay that way forever.
The two companies are fiercely competing. By stating one of them "the largest"
you're giving people an impression that you are being too pushy or not careful
enough. I dunno in the US, but this is bad for potential customers in Japan
who would expect certain prudence from financial companies. And apparently
they just translated this into Japanese straightforward, which they shouldn't
if they really care about marketing in Japan. Hope they learn these subtleties
soon.

~~~
simonk
ANA is the largest airline in Japan though.

~~~
redcap
I've always thought of it as playing second fiddle to JAL. That's changed
after JAL had to go through a lot of restructuring, but it's mostly been these
two companies. There could be some numbers out there stating that ANA is the
largest, but I'd guess there wouldn't be much of a margin.

~~~
danielvf
2015 revenue from air transportation:

    
    
        ANA - 1,484,600 million yen
        JAL - 1,205,200 million yen
    

That's pretty clear lead, and it's increasing year by year.

[1]
[https://www.ana.co.jp/group/investors/irdata/annual/pdf/16f/...](https://www.ana.co.jp/group/investors/irdata/annual/pdf/16f/16_F_11.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.jal.com/en/investor/library/finance/pdf/fy2015q4...](https://www.jal.com/en/investor/library/finance/pdf/fy2015q4_en0428.pdf)

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kyriakos
When is the rest of EU coming up? Same regulations everywhere I can't
understand the hold up.

~~~
jwr
Braintree doesn't ignore the EU like Stripe. Use Braintree.

~~~
briandear
How does Stripe ignore the EU? It's available in quite a lot of countries
here. Perhaps you mean 'ignore my specific country in the EU.'

~~~
jwr
I am glad it is available in your specific country in the EU :-)

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jorangreef
Well done on the Japan launch.

Any plans to add South Africa soon?

It would be great to have Stripe on African soil.

~~~
vuyani
YES PLEASE! ive beeeen waiting for stripe to come to South Africa, alot of
other developers i know too are terribly frustrated of the unstable payment
gateways we have down here. Stripe would be a much needed breath of fresh air.

~~~
kizum
I'm in the process of evaluating payment gateways for a Saas app that's
currently using Stripe in the US, but needs to move to South Africa in the
next few months. The closest I've come to something similar to Stripe is
2Checkout, but the lack proper of support for subscriptions (trial periods,
product id's) is very dissapointing.

~~~
vuyani
Yea, im considering using PayU while waiting for Stripe. Just really dislike
the fact that they use soap services

PayU([http://payu.co.za](http://payu.co.za))

PayU
subscriptions:[http://help.payu.co.za/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=8553425](http://help.payu.co.za/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=8553425)

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marak830
So happy about this, I've been on the stripe beta here for a while, and the
support has been amazing. Keep up the good work!

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benlambert
Does this mean Stripe Japan users can now accept USD, or is it still only JPY?

~~~
patio11
This does mean that Stripe users in Japan can charge in USD, or our other
supported currencies. You put the currency in the API call based on whatever
logic you want; we charge the user's CC in the specified currency; we credit
your bank account JPY at the appropriate rate. (I work at Stripe, in Japan.)

As is typical for Stripe, this involved an ungodly amount of offline work to
enable an extra query parameter that most of our customers will never have to
think deeply about the implementation of.

~~~
benlambert
Great news!

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user5994461
Just a reminder:

In Europe the main competitor is Adyen, which is basically the exact same
thing, with a lower commission.

There is a truckload of marketing and news about Stripe, but really, it's
nothing we didn't already have on our side of the Atlantic ;)

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matchagaucho
Congrats! Great to see the growth.

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megafounder
A feature that would make Stripe even more awesome would be the possibility to
withdraw $USD to $USD bank accounts located in Europe without the need of
losing 2% or more on conversion fees (or lower those fees!).

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bryanwbh
Looking forward to Stripe's availability in Malaysia!

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FLUX-YOU
Damn, patio11 got busy. Launching stuff in a whole new country for Stripe.

~~~
patio11
The Japan team was very, very busy for the last several months preparing for
launch specifically and the last year getting the groundwork in place for
servicing Japanese businesses. I literally arrived back in Japan the day
before launch, got my business cards, and just had to do some minor
translation and utility salarymanning.

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whatnotests
Good God does this mean I can actually buy something from Japanese online
shops without being hassled by international payment problems?

Great!

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magicbuzz
I like the Mt Fuji graphic.

~~~
FoeNyx
Isn't this way too steep to be Mt Fuji?

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misterGautham
Interesting! Japan hasn't had many startups come in for a while.

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malloryerik
Next stop, Korea?

