
Kicking off Stripe’s private beta in India - rahulshiv
https://stripe.com/blog/india-private-beta
======
git-pull
By the way, stripe has a cool new project, "stripe-mock":
[https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock)

It lets you run a local stripe API on your machine. I've got high hopes in it.
This could be the cure to building resilient stripe tests on local machines.

The maintainer @brandur seems to know his stuff in regards to rest apis.

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lawrencewu
Oh god, thanks so much for this. I've literally just been testing on prod and
praying that it works.

~~~
bballer
You know you can generate a API test token and use one of test card numbers
for all your testing purposes. There is a toggle in your main dashboard which
will let you switch between sandbox/test mode and production for viewing
charges etc.

~~~
diggan
This assumes you have internet connection always when developing/running
tests, which is not always the case.

I always to rely on local tools/endpoints so when I'm offline, I can still
continue working. Don't use Stripe as much as before but I definitely I wished
I had this mock when implementing Stripe in applications I worked on.

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temp9910
I have really high hopes from this. There is currently no good way for a SaaS
startup in India to get money from international customers. I think this is
why many are forced to incorporate in the US/Singapore/etc. I am a single
founder working on a SaaS project and receiving payments from outside India is
one of the biggest challenges for me. I do not want to raise funds but may
have to got that route just so that I can incorporate outside India and start
receiving payments.

I have three requests for Stripe:

1) I hope that Stripe does not come out with a limited version for India, and
that it is possible to charge international customers a variable amount every
month, like you can do in the US.

2) I also hope that they come up with a prompt way of issuing FIRCs for every
payment received. Without an FIRC there is no way to prove that the
transaction was an export and therefore you have to pay GST on it, which is
normally 18% for services. This reason alone is pushing me to incorporate in
some other country. I stand to lose thousands of dollars this year because I
can't get an FIRC for the payments I receive via Paypal/Wire
transfer/Transferwise.

Paypal and Transferwise have procedures to get FIRCs, but when you approach
their banks they either don't respond or come up with hundred reasons to not
issue one. Citibank absolutely sucks at this. I really hope that Stripe just
charges me whatever they want and couriers the FIRCs to my address
automatically.

3) I hope that Stripe has a legal setup that is compatible with RBI
regulations regarding the filling up of SOFTEX forms. There are some
restrictions which in my understanding prohibit Indians from using
international gateways like fastspring.

~~~
sudhirj
How does paddle.com handle this? They take over as merchant of record, and so
technically they're selling your SaaS and paying you royalties via a reverse
invoice. Any idea if they need to or give our FIRCs?

~~~
danieltillett
Are you suggesting that paddle.com gets around the RBI restrictions for
companies based outside of India selling to Indians?

~~~
sudhirj
Not really - they're a London based company, and they follow whatever laws are
applicable in the country of each customer (EU gets VAT, India gets GST, US
gets nothing), etc.

If I work with them, the idea is that I've sold my product to them, so I'm
exporting it to a company in London. I'll need to either pay or get exemptions
for my taxes based on export rules. They re-sell it worldwide and handle
whatever country specific rules are prevalent in each country, but that's not
my problem any more.

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adtac
Oh god yes, thank you! I've wanted this for so long. I'm building a SaaS and I
seriously considered paying $500 for Stripe Atlas to incorporate in the US
just for Stripe. (I don't expect my crowd to be from any particular country,
so a global payments vendor is the best option.)

The state of payments here is sub-par; while providers are still coming up,
the documentation is just not sufficient (at least not up to Stripe's
standards), the APIs are a bit convoluted, and the whole thing feels shaky.
Plus, Stripe is trusted by customers, so I bet at least a few of them would be
more comfortable if they see the familiar Stripe payment form.

~~~
superasn
I agree with you. The timing couldn't be better and I've tried most of the
other payment processors but I didn't find them usable at all. Waiting eagerly
to get my invite and hope this isn't some crippled version due to RBI
regulations.

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ktta
>In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to
the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users

This is the statistic that will change the world more than a little bit. This
is partly because the richest man in India has spent $25bn on telecom
infrastructure and acquisition of new customers.

Here's a related article -
[https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-n...](https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-new-
customers-cost-cool-25bn-acquire-mukesh-ambani-has-made-business-worlds)

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nocoder
This is going to be tough. The competition in payment ecosystem is pretty hot
in India. You have Alibaba funded paytm with about 250 million users. They
provide digital wallet services which can be used for buying anything from
flights tickets to electronics online or paying for Uber. Apart from that they
are also present offline, you can but grocery or even tea with that.
Additionally they also have payments bank licence so you can have your bank
account there itself. Then there is Jio money funded by India s richest man
which also operates in telecom and has roughly 100 million users, they also
have a payments bank licence. Finally there is Amazon pay, which is moving
slowly but has recently tied up with lot of websites for movies or online food
delivery. So the competition is likely to be fierce.

~~~
subbu
YC has funded 2 Indian startups in this space: Razorpay, and Cashfree, and now
Stripe has also entered the space. Along with the startups some big banks are
also in the fray. I started with HDFC payments for my company's payments but
moved away from them; they expect you to work at their pace. That'd have
killed us by now. I wrote about my payment experiences here:
[https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-
payments.h...](https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-
payments.html)

~~~
sharmi
Hi Subbu,

The canonical url for your page is set to
[http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-
payments.html](http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-payments.html) .
That is not the best option for SEO :)

~~~
subbu
Thank you, Sharmi. I really appreciate you taking out time to look at the
source and point out the issue. I have fixed the canonical url. I also noticed
the feed url was wrong too. I have fixed that as well :)

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dhruvrrp
What's the credit/debit card penetration like in India? I recall most
transactions happening in cash when i visited a few years ago. Which also led
to amazon and flipkart offering cash on delivery payment methods.

Did something change in relation to that? coz if not then stripe is gonna have
a hard time finding customers

~~~
simonk
Others have pointed it out that it may but its also for Indian startups being
able to easily accept payments internationally without setting up a US
company.

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kartickv
As someone who doesn't know Stripe well, because it hasn't been available in
India, is it just a payment gateway, allowing me to put a Buy button in my
site or app to charge someone's credit card, debit card, net banking or Paytm?

~~~
Operyl
Payment processor, so “buy button on site/app/etc”

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blocked_again
It would be interesting to watch Stripe competing with the Razorpay which
started as the Stripe of India. Both are funded by YC.

~~~
adtac
Wait, YC would fund a startup that's a competitor to one of its other
startups? Huh, this is news for me (and it opens up the possibility of me
applying to YC; previously I was apprehensive because YC had funded a direct
competitor ~10 years ago).

~~~
SingAlong
RazorPay is India-focused and started a few years ago. Until they came around,
there were few (zero?) payment gateways that fulfilled all the following
criteria:

* Clean API

* Support India-focused payment options (netbanking is huge here. And Razorpay also supports digital-wallets)

* Easy to get started fast with less paperwork

For every other payment gateway, you had to go through a papertrail before you
could even tryout the sandbox API.

I remember Razorpay (initially atleast) required only PAN and allowed
individuals to start accepting payments. This IMHO is huge indie-friendly. And
back then, for every payment gateway you had to be a registered company. Not
sure if that relaxed rule translated to an uptick in growth.

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superasn
Is the Indian Stripe account same in functionality as the US account? Or is it
restricted in some way due to the strict RBI rules in India?

~~~
shripadk
Hopefully without restrictions! Fingers crossed!

If it's going to be restricted in some major way, then there won't be any
difference between Stripe and say PayPal which makes it a non-starter.

RBI really needs to loosen up a bit, especially when it comes to over-
regulation of the Software sector.

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0x62
I'm still waiting for Stripe to launch in the UK's Crown Dependencies. I'm
based in Jersey, and we have no (easy) marketplace payment solution.

Currently using Safecharge, which is quite good, however the setup process
requires submitting 10+ documents with details on the company structure, UBOs
and nature of business.

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pvsukale3
Razorpay (funded by YC) is a competitor to Stripe in India. Has anyone tried
using it? How was your experience?

~~~
sunilkumarc
A couple of months back I wanted to try Razorpay for receiving payments from
my app users. Just like donate button in PayPal. But Razorpay was not
supporting independent developers at that time.

While Stripe supports this feature beautifully, it wasn't supporting in India.
Now I'm excited to hear this news.

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akhatri_aus
Can you do subscriptions, how does it work with the compulsory 3D secure
rules?

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danieltillett
Does this allow companies outside of India to accept payment from Indians
without an international credit card?

~~~
anilgulecha
Isn't that true already? My friends and I have been able to use local bank
debit cards and they work as expected on international sites.

~~~
danieltillett
Well yes and no. The vast majority of Indian credit and debit cards don’t work
outside of India. You need to get special permission from your bank to be able
to use an Indian CC outside of India [0].

0\. I have to say that I have not looked into this in detail in the last 12
months so if things have changed with the RBI I would be very happy to know.

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kylehotchkiss
Will this accept RuPay?

