
Ask HN: Best payment processor? - Gaessaki
Hi HN,<p>Does anyone have any recommendations for a payment processor for use by a startup?<p>Some details:<p>-We have a high volume of payments with low margins.<p>-The tech stack is node.js with react&#x2F;redux. There is a planned iOS&#x2F;Android app.<p>-We&#x27;re based out of Canada and only serve Canadian customers.<p>Even if your preferred processor doesn&#x27;t cater to those bullet points, I would be interested in hearing your experience with them. Thanks in advance.<p>P.S. I&#x27;m sure this question has been asked many times already, but I found nothing too relevant from within the past year: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=payment%20processor&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;prefix&amp;page=0&amp;dateRange=pastYear&amp;type=story
======
johnnyg
We've run on Stripe for 2 years now.

Good onboarding, snappy support replies by smart people, they do what they say
they'll do, good transparency when there are mistakes, early heads up on
changes. Overall, they are solid people running a solid business. We respect
them and enjoy being clients of theirs.

We're a medium sized business and we run charges pretty regularly through out
the day. Their status page only reports their larger outages. If you are
running charges regularly, expect their end points do go down for 20 secs up
to 2 minutes 2-3 times a month. Its to the point where our customer service
chat knows what's going on and says things like "ask the customer to wait 2
minutes, it'll be right back". Its frustrating. We've considered setting up a
fail over with spreedly and braintree but its juuuust inside the threshold of
annoying enough to do all that.

That minor gripe said, I still have the Stripe afterglow because we suffered
through the Auth.net days and the AMEX domination days. Stripe set us, and
everybody else, free from that jazz. We're still grateful and probably always
will be.

Lastly I note, if your volume merits, they will discuss alternative rates
within reason.

You should go with Stripe.

------
chrisgoman
Your details show that you know your business well. What exactly does high
volume of payments mean? What does low margins mean? With credit card
processing, it is about specifics. The magic numbers are:

1) Dollar amount processed by month

2) Average dollar amount per transaction

From there, you can figure out the rest

For startups, the default is ALWAYS Stripe (IMHO) because you can get to
processing cards right away - like in 5 minutes. Their API is easy, their
virtual terminal works as expected for manually keyed in transactions. There
is even a super dumb screen that is just HTML (Checkout) if you don't even
want to deal with an API.

As far as the fees, the $0.30 per transaction fee is always going to be there.
The 2.9% percent is negotiable, specially if you are doing volume. If you are
doing $1,000/mo, 2.9% will be your rate.

If you are doing much higher volume, that rate goes down. For example, if you
can show (with proof via bank statements or from your current merchant
provider) something like $300-400k per month for the last 3 months, I was able
to get them very close to what is called the "interchange rate" which is the
lowest rate you can get even with traditional processors like Moneris
(FirstData). My current "effective rate" is about 1.6-1.7% (effective rate is
my quick math of fees/total).

Like somebody already said, micropayments are pretty bad.

High volume + low margins make it sound like you are operating a restaurant
where the fees are much more different due to the physical nature of the
business (less fraud due to card present) vs internet (card not present)

~~~
Gaessaki
Thanks for this nugget of knowledge. Wasn't aware it was possible to negotiate
the rate down unless you were a BigCo. 1.7% is impressive, that's the rate we
had for our brick and mortar restaurant in the past.

We're not doing micropayments. Each transaction is around $50-$200, with <5%
margins. Volume is low 100ks. (Didn't mention this earlier because I didn't
want to seem like I was getting my homework done by others, planned to
research the general recommendations.)

------
oisino
I help run ReCharge a billing platform for ecommerce stores. We have thousands
of ecommerce stores using a variety of processors. From their experiences I
have seen the following.

If you process less than 80k a month: _Use Stripe their API is the best and
they just innovate faster than everyone else. Love these guys!

If you process 80k - 250k a month: _At this level support becomes a bigger
factor and unfortunately Braintree just kills Stripe on this side. The below
forum post alone shows how much people hate Stripe support. I know their
fixing this area but its really hard for medium size business to work with a
processor without phone support. Braintree literally picks up the phone in
minutes while sometimes Stripe takes days to get back. This is killer when
your dealing with thousands of charges a month.

[https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/payments-shipping-
fulfilment...](https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/payments-shipping-
fulfilment/t/worst-experience-with-stripe-payment-gate-how-many-people-using-
stripe-151491)

If you process 250k+ a month: _I hate to say this but I would seriously look
at Authorize or one of the traditional processors. They just provide the best
rates and you have to factor how much the cost savings is worth with the
increase in implementation pain.

_ __I want to emphasize my feedback changes depending on the type of business
your in and how quickly you need innovate / change your processing. Stripe is
really moving fast on new innovations which is awesome. But you have to
realize basic merchant processing is a commodity so your paying a premium for
non commoditized things like a great API. Also things like a great API are
becoming commoditized. Stripe is smart and their launching new non
commoditized features like Atlas/ Platform Functionality/ ACH etc. The only
thing you have to ask yourself do you need these new innovations or just
traditional merchant processing.

------
wuliwong
I switched to Braintree after having some trouble with the initial integration
of Stripe in a Rails application I made about 9 months ago. I am an
experienced Rails developer and found the Stripe documentation to be a bit out
of step with "the Rails way" and a little incomplete. I switched to Braintree
and was up and running with relative ease.

I can't speak to my experience as a Braintree customer as sadly my app hasn't
processed many payments but the initial integration using Braintree was much
easier for me.

~~~
romainhuet
I work at Stripe and would love to hear how we could improve the experience of
integrating with Rails. Just shoot me an email (romain@stripe.com)—even bullet
points are helpful. Thank you!

~~~
wuliwong
I'll take a look and shoot you an email. Hopefully I'll be able to refresh my
memory, it's been a little while.

------
eldavido
I'm in the middle of redoing the card processing system for a hotel property
management system.

I'd consider using Stripe and have in the past, but we're doing millions/month
USD (less than you'd think with a high-dollar, low-margin business) almost
entirely card-present, now with EMV, which puts us way outside Stripe's target
market. We also have a complex approval process and capture/settlement several
days after approval, which, again, isn't really in stripe's wheelhouse.

Don't use heartland. I've had to deal with them a lot over the past month and
they're absolute garbage. Shit API, integration specialists that can't be
bothered, NDAs before they'll look at you, just all-around bad experience.
They also announced they're deprecating SHA-1 support, which would be prudent
except that they gave merchants _two weeks_ notice before doing it.

------
joshjkim
not sure if low margins = smaller $$ value for each payment or just small %
your taking, but Paypal offers a micro-transaction fee rate: 5% + 5 cents
(USD). For transactions under $12, this is usually preferable to the standard
rates from Paypal or Stripe. If transaction size goes above and below that,
you can set-up two separate accounts and direct payments above a threshold to
one account and payments below the threshold to another account. we do that at
my company, and it saves us LOADS in fees.

Last I checked, no other service has any separate fee for micropayments.
Paypal doesn't make it easy to find this info out, but it definitely still
offers the product.

of course paypal can be really, really annoying to work with, as their code is
VERY old and their APIs can be confusing. They also have a weird variety of
products that semi-overlap, so selection of which specific product to use can
be confusing (Express Checkout vs. Instant Checkout vs. Adaptive payments..?).

a few other things to note: paypal's international coverage is much better
than any other provider, so if you want to expand to EU or South America
quickly, they are good for that. also, paypals payout process (MassPay) is
much easier to use than ACH or any other solutions I've seen, and much cheaper
(2% transaction fee for payouts). Also, all the payee needs is an email
address, no bank account info, etc.

Truthfully, those are two reasons we still use Paypal. Otherwise, it kinda
sucks =)

~~~
aianus
> also, paypals payout process (MassPay) is much easier to use than ACH or any
> other solutions I've seen, and much cheaper (2% transaction fee for payouts)

ACH payouts cost a flat fee of tens of cents afaik.

~~~
joshjkim
ah yes, ur right. not cheaper.

------
flurdy
In my previous uk startup for an online game (100 mill players) we used
multiple providers. Vindicia, Playspan and Paypal as well as physical shop
based game time cards. And then also later directly with Apple's appstore and
Google's Play store.

You might find yourself requiring multiple providers for different
requirements and redundancy.

Playspan was for example very good at the south american market, Vindicia very
good at retrying failed payments and auto replacing card details for recurring
subscriptions. And a lot of customers expected to be able to pay with Paypal
whom are also good at fraud prevention.

But to echo everyone here, if my "next" startup requires a payments provider I
would initially go with Stripe and/or Braintree.

------
robertpohl
For European merchants, there is a payment processor called
Https://www.mondido.com/en (I'm the founder). What makes Mondido different is
the support for dynamic 3D-secure, and other conversation optimization tools.
If you are selling cross border, this is a must since some issuing banks
require 3ds on all purchases, and others doesn't support it.

~~~
Silhouette
That could be very interesting, not just for having 3DS, but also for a few
other things you mention on your web site. That site, at least in the English
version, seems to be missing some important details, such as:

\- what your fees are

\- how international payments in different currencies work on your system

\- how reliable transactions using your optimization tools typically are, and
how this compares to other payment processing services

\- an explanation of how an integration with your APIs and webhooks can be
tested.

Do you have more information available somewhere?

~~~
robertpohl
Thanks for the reply!

\- Fees are 1.89% on all cards ([https://www.mondido.com/en/get-
going](https://www.mondido.com/en/get-going))

\- We are using data and business intelligence to customize each transaction
according to both the merchant and consumer need. This means switching to
fallback processing, alternative payment methods, etc.

\- I'd say that our webhooks are very different and more flexible compared to
others. You can customize both the body and headers and use any data from the
payment such as; consumer, products, fraud-check etc.
([https://www.mondido.com/blog/webhooks-payments-connected-
to-...](https://www.mondido.com/blog/webhooks-payments-connected-to-the-
world))

Read more about the tech in our docs:
[https://doc.mondido.com/api](https://doc.mondido.com/api)

The main differentiator is that we strive towards maximum payment conversion,
to rescue all failed payments.

Where competitors have ~80%-90% we provide closer to 95% success rate, which
is the real value of Mondido.

~~~
Silhouette
Thanks for the follow-up.

FYI, I'm not sure whether that get-going page is actually linked from anywhere
on your main English site right now. I looked for some considerable time and
didn't find anything like that page.

Maybe I would have to start the sign-up process to see it if I didn't have the
link from you? If so, you might like to consider that you're asking me to give
details and agree to terms and conditions in a language I don't speak before I
can get anywhere, which is a barrier that I'm obviously not going to cross at
this stage (or probably ever).

I did have a look through your documentation, including the API page you
linked to, but still didn't find answers to some important questions like the
ones I mentioned before. For example, if I were to charge a customer in a
Eurozone country a price in EUR, but I'm in the UK and my accounts and bank
work in GBP, how are exchange rates handled, how do I see the figures used in
both currencies through your API, and are there any additional fees for doing
the conversion? Testing the integration is also a big deal, and it seems you
have some mechanisms to help with that, but again I couldn't find clear
documentation about how they work and what isolates a test deployment from a
production one.

I do think Mondido is very interesting, both as a possible service for some of
my own business interests and more generally for online businesses here in the
UK. Having a Europe-centric service similar to the likes of Stripe and
Braintree would have some real advantages, particularly if you also have good
support, an emphasis on reliability, and lower fees than some of the other
services. I hope that in the future you'll fill in some of the missing details
on your site and produce an English version of your legalese, because I can
imagine Mondido attracting quite a lot of business from around here and of
course having good competition in this space would be better for merchants as
well.

Edit: The page you linked to also says "The total price for Mondido is 1.89%
and 1.89 SEK per transaction", so does that mean actually the fees are
1.89%+1.89SEK, not just the 1.89% you mentioned before?

~~~
robertpohl
Hi Silhouette, I really appreciate your feedback! Regarding the English
version, we will update the website very soon.

You bring up some other really valid points: \- Exchange rates; if you charge
in EUR and settle in GBP, a charge of 0,66% will be added.

\- Test and production is almost the same; before you go live, your account
will be in test mode, and after you are live you will always be able to send
in "test=true" to make test transactions. No separate environments (unless you
create multiple merchant accounts, which you can).

\- Price; We'll charge a percent fee for all European countries except for
Sweden which also has a fixed transaction fee.

Bedsides that, we also support Invoice, PayPal, DirectBank and Swish. Let me
know if you have further questions or feedback!

Best, Robert

~~~
Silhouette
Thanks for the extra details. I know at least one business that is actively
looking into online payment options at the moment, and a few people including
myself who might deal with these issues again in the future and so like to
keep aware of what's available. If you do reach a point where you've got more
complete documentation and English legal agreements available, I'm sure a lot
of us would be interested enough to take a look, because it seems Mondido does
currently have some significant advantages over some of the other services but
at least here in Cambridge, UK it doesn't seem to be very well known so far.

FWIW, I don't think the occasional post submitted to HN as you develop your
service would be out of line either, certainly if you did update to be more
accessible to UK businesses.

------
florincm
We just signed with a London based company judopay and they offered us a great
deal. They are mostly focused on mobile payments but support rest as well. Our
deal is 0.75% + 0.15 with a monthly fee of £100 which i think is really great.

I've had a great experience so far, the staff is very open and responsive.

We originally intended to go with stripe, but they refused us as 'forbidden
business' which we aren't as we reviewed their terms plenty of times to see
what we fall under. I asked for a clarification/re-review multiple times, but
i got no reply which i think is very unprofessional.

------
Cieplak
Just to list a few:

\- Stripe

\- Braintree

\- Adyen

\- Paypal

\- Wells Fargo Merchant Services

\- Chase Paymentech

\- Vantiv (acquired Litle)

\- Forte (acquired ACH Direct)

\- WorldPay

\- Skrill

\- Moneris

\- Coinbase

\- AMEX

\- Auth.net

Stripe is probably your best bet, but should you decide to choose anyone else,
let me know if you'd like any help as I've integrated with most of these
processors before :)

PS: Ultimately your decision should come down to your card blend, i.e., if you
process mainly debit cards (Durbin regulated and basically zero interchange),
go with a processor who will offer you interchange-plus pricing. If you
process mostly premium cards, go with a processor who will offer you a blended
rate, since they'll probably be eating their AMEX transaction fees (typically
around 3.5%).

~~~
mooreds
Can you speak to the strengths and weaknesses of any of these?

~~~
Cieplak
There are quite a few metrics to compare on, such as ease of integration
(client libraries, documentation), reliability (downtime, SLAs), pricing
(blended vs interchange-plus), customer support (response time might be quick
but might take several days to talk to someone technical), countries and
reporting. Reporting is actually really important and often overlooked, and
especially matters when you get big. Make sure it's easy to reconcile all your
payments with your processor statements. You'd be surprised at how often
payment processors' accounting is wrong, in their favor.

------
supster
I'm currently running a Node.js/Express.js/MongoDB service with a
Bootstrap/jQuery frontend and iOS + Android clients. My payments mix also
tends to be high volume and low margin. I have been extremely satisfied with
Stripe - they have a solid api, a great npm package[1] to interface with their
api, thorough documentation with examples in node[2], and a wonderful
dashboard. I highly recommend them.

1) [https://github.com/stripe/stripe-node](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-
node) 2)
[https://stripe.com/docs/api/node#intro](https://stripe.com/docs/api/node#intro)

------
palidanx
I've integrated Braintree for monthly recurring subscription services and for
digital product purchases. For my own purposes, I built my own cart in Rails
as I needed a degree of flexibility in check-out.

So far I haven't run into any problems. The only thing I really needed was to
customize customer e-mails, so I used Braintree's webhooks to my server to
send out my own e-mails.

Support wise, I was on the phone with them quite a bit in the beginning, and
they were nice and knowledgeable. I used them pre-paypal and post-paypal i
haven't noticed any differences.

Fraud wise, my customers tend to be reliable ones so I haven't had to worry
about fraud yet.

------
jblake
-We have a high volume of payments with low margins.

Based on this alone, you need to get your own merchant account and gateway. I
highly recommend Beanstream in Canada for the gateway. A proper merchant
account (interchange plus pricing, either Chase Paymentech or TD are good)
will boost your margins. For example, processing a debit card has a much lower
interchange rate than a credit card (I don't think the rate is as good as the
USA, but its still 1%+ difference).

Beanstream will also give you the option of Interac Online - which is a flat
transaction fee between 20-50c.

~~~
Gaessaki
I noticed that TD had a white label solution for Beanstream on their site.
Would it be better to go through TD and snag a merchant account in the process
or to Beanstream directly?

Thanks for bringing up beanstream by the way. I saw them earlier but hadn't
considered them as everyone mainly favoured Braintree or Stripe. Being able to
process Interact Online is a boon.

~~~
jblake
I've actually talked to TD about that before. You'll most likely get better
rates by going to TD directly - one less middleman... but working with
Beanstream can also have its perks. If you are doing any aggregation
(marketplace payments) then you will definitely need to get the merchant
account from Beanstream as TD won't take on that kind of risk. TD does not
seem to offer true Interchange+ pricing either. Chase Paymentech does (I was
quoted interchange + 5 cents). If you have the time and energy, I would get
the MA from Chase, and the gateway from beanstream.

------
coreyp_1
We found Stripe to be the easiest and most affordable to implement. $.30 +
2.9% processing fee per transaction, though.

Micropayments are tough (if that's what you're going for).

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Did you look into Braintree? If so, why did you choose Stripe over Braintree?
The reason I ask is because I recently looked into this and found Braintree to
have much better service so far. I'm wondering if there is something about
Stripe that I'm not taking into account, or if they are just growing too fast
and not giving new customers as good service.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'd be interested in hearing about where Stripe's service was lacking.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
I speculate that they have grown very fast and have changed from a small firm
that provides good service to a large firm that is capitalizing as much as
they can from their situation.

With paypal and Braintree, I was able to easily get someone on the phone. Even
though Braintree has been acquired by Paypal, Paypal had the best service,
Braintree had issues with their phone system and the sales people were not as
knowledgeable or helpful - this I did not expect from Paypal.

The person from Stripe explained that he could not talk to me on the phone
(only e-mail) because they are growing so fast. Growing fast is a great thing
for the people who own and invested in Stripe, but it is bad for me as the
customer because it means I will get a more inferior experience while they
catch up with their growth. (Even once their growth is complete, its hard to
say what kind of company it will have turned into) If I'm going to run over
100k a year in sales through a company, I think it is very reasonable to
expect to get someone on the phone. Also, this is a very important thing for
our company. Its risky and unwise to do this much business with a company that
I cannot get on the phone.

The next issue I had with Stripe is that they didn't have much interest in
working with my small company. My first hint of this was their contact form.
The lowest tier I could select on our monthly credit card revenue was "<75k a
month". So I wasn't surprised when the rep explained to me that I couldn't get
a rate below 2.9% until we did 80k a month in sales. We are a small company
that does about 9k a month credit card sales. Paypal was willing to give us
2.5% because we did more than 3k a month, _and_ if we went up to 10k a month,
they would _automatically_ reduce our rate again. Braintree quoted 2.4% based
on our sales volume.

~~~
compumike
At $9K/month, the difference between 2.9% and 2.5% rates is 0.004 * 9000 =
$36/month.

If using Stripe's super-friendly APIs (and management portal) isn't worth
$36/month to you compared to PayPal's APIs, that's certainly your choice.

The "widest" gap will be if you grow to doing just under Stripe's $80K/month
cutoff for their first tier of rate discounts, paying them 2.9% while you'd be
at 2.2% with PayPal. Here the difference is at most 0.007 * 80000 =
$560/month. At that point, how much developer time is it worth investing for
you to "recover" 0.7% of revenue? Or is there some better use of that valuable
time to grow your business by 0.7% -- at which time you have access to more
favorable rates from Stripe?

(Disclaimer: happily abandoned PayPal's API several years ago, using Stripe
happily since then! Maybe PayPal has improved, I don't know.)

~~~
ChrisDutrow
You are right that extra developer time wouldn't be worth the savings.

The problem is that they communicated to me that my business is not worth very
much to them. This is a precarious situation for my company to be in because
our merchant processor is a key part of our business.

My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me that as a general rule, its not
a good idea to work with companies that don't care about you as a customer or
for which you are not a target customer. The reason this is not a good idea is
because it significantly increases the risk that I will run into unanticipated
problems that they will be unlikely to fix.

Stripe basically told me that I am not their target customer and that they
don't care about me unless my business is 10x the size it is now. Based on
their contact form, I was a little surprised that they were willing to take me
as a customer at all.

Perhaps a good analogy is the big bank vs credit union situation. If I was a
very large business, I would have a good experience working with a large,
national bank. But (I think) statistically speaking, individual consumers are
more likely to be happy with smaller credit unions where they are worth more
as a customer.

------
paymentshound
Braintree has a Canadian product that allows you to present and settle in CAD
and USD. You can check out the documentation for their best integration here:
[https://www.braintreepayments.com/v.zero](https://www.braintreepayments.com/v.zero).
They also have a support team that will answer any questions you may have by
phone or email as you investigate different payment processors.

------
bryanthompson
If you're doing online charges only, Stripe gets my vote. If you're building
an app and need to accept cards in person, take a look at
[https://cardflight.com](https://cardflight.com). I'm an engineer for
CardFlight and in the past was lead developer for a gateway with stripe-like
functionality.

------
zurbi
Usually I recommend Avangate, Bluesnap, Cleverbrige or Fastspring. The best
part is that with these services there is nothing to configure. You just link
to your page on their servers, they even theme it for you.

Downside: The cost is somewhat higher. So I don't think they work for a low
margin business.

------
joeld42
I will echo the recommendations for Stripe. I used it for a side project that
needed to process payments for enrichment classes organized by our school's
PTA, and have had zero problems over the last two years, processing around
$150k of payments.

------
contingencies
If any payment processor is interested in having someone who knows the ins and
outs help them implement IBAN-based bank transfers for customers in SEPA or
other regions really well, let me know.

------
debacle
If you have a high volume of payments (like you actually have a high volume)
you're not going to want to work with an off the shelf processor. Negotiate
your fees down where you can.

------
hotpockets
Could you use an ACH solution? I guess consumers may not be familiar with it,
but stripe ACH looked customer friendly. I think they charge 0.8%.

~~~
Gaessaki
What exactly is an ACH solution? Is it this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House)
Seems like it's US only, unfortunately we're Canada only. This sounds really
cool though, thanks for the find!

Edit: For anyone else, I assume this is what you're talking about
[https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-ach-
payments-...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-ach-payments-
with-stripe)

~~~
phonon
You can do ACH transactions from Canadian bank accounts. I know Forte supports
it. (Though the actual routing is not exactly "ACH".) Interac Online might be
more popular though (that is a very different payment process, and requires
actual logging into your bank, last I looked.)

------
Gaessaki
For any other Canadian startups, this chart of payment processors came in
handy for us: [https://www.payfirma.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Canadas-...](https://www.payfirma.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Canadas-Top-Payment-Processors.pdf)

~~~
_pdeschen
Interesting overview. What about Stripe?

------
Champ1
I'd say Forte for sure. They have a 48 hour deposit time on credit/debit
transactions. For eChecks they can work it out that funds are deposited in 24
hours. Sales, Customer Service, and Tech Support has always been a good
expirience for me.

------
jackhorner
MerchantGuy.com does custom pricing with their partners. Saved us a ton over
Stripe.

------
ckorhonen
Braintree

------
jackhorner
MerchantGuy.com does custom pricing. Saved us a ton over Stripe.

------
itsinfo
The top 5 I have experience with - * Stripe - Great selection of currencies to
accept * Braintree - Great developer API * Helcim - Best pricing * BitPay -
Easy Bitcoin integration, versatile API * Coinbase - Get started accepting
Bitcoin in seconds

The last 2 are Bitcoin focused!

------
grover_hartmann
Why nobody mentioned Bitcoin?

~~~
mtmail
Bitcoin isn't a payment processor. (I understand you can link your bank
account to a bitcoin wallet and read your comment from three months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10712965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10712965)).
So in this discussion bitcoin doesn't answer the submitter's question. I'm
sure when selecting payment processors Bitcoin support is still on the nice-
to-have list and not a hard requirement.

