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.
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. :)
Stripe's tech and customer service was unparalleled for the small business I had. Other guys like Braintree were just so far behind. If I hadn't used Stripe, I would have assumed the hype was over-hype as well. I don't think it is though.
I'm not sure what you expected? This is akin to going to a retailer and expecting distributor pricing. You went to a PSP when you should have been talking to a bank, the only laughable part is that, somehow, a company with this kind of volume didn't even know what they were trying to buy.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
