For any Ruby on Rails developers in the UK who may now be jumping into Stripe for the first time because of this, Pete Keen has just released (or is releasing today) a new book called Mastering Modern Payments (http://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments) which focus on Stripe and Rails.
Honestly, the API docs and Gem are so good you don't need a book.
From sitting down can looking over the docs to charging my debit card for a monthly subscription took about an hour (and I'm not even that good with ruby, if you're a pro you could do it in half an hour I reckon).
I totally agree that Stripe is easy to get started with and I believe their documentation is the best in the industry. But, as someone who processes payments in the six figures annually with Stripe, I feel there is definitely still room for a book like Pete's, in the same way that there was a place for a book about design patterns even among talented and experienced developers. His book builds on the platform, rather than replacing the documentation.
I manage a drop-in Rails engine for adding Stripe subscriptions to an app (http://github.com/andrewculver/koudoku) and the number one piece of feedback I get is that people wish they had heard of it before they integrated Stripe subscriptions in their app. This tells me that there is room for gems like mine and books like Pete's in the little ecosystem Stripe has created.
I'm happy to say that I will not be a member of this "before" group. Thanks for pointing it out today. I look forward to using your gem and buying Pete's book.
It's payment systems that are supported. Not debit or credit cards.
My debit card is from Visa, and Visa is a supported payment system.
I think that's why he makes a point of saying American Express in the blog post too, it's one of the more obscure payment systems in the UK.
On a side note, I remember my mother, who runs a corner shop, giving anyone who pays on AmEx the evil eye because they have a higher merchant fee in the UK and it takes a few extra days to clear.
I wonder if Stripe UK have the same fees for AmEx...
It used to be a few extra weeks! Quite a few years ago I was buying an expensive (for me) watch in the UK. I asked if they took Amex, they said "yes". "What's it worth to use my bank card" I asked. I think they may have got a little flustered but the difference was £150 on an amount near £1000. It was the only real benefit I got out of having that card for about 15 years.
I recall when I worked for a big UK company we took our teams industrial placement students out to dinner at the end of their time with us (around 15 people)
The restaurant refused the company amex card of the team manager and one of the better off senior members of the team had to put it on his debit card and claim it back.
If a company genuinely operates out of Ireland, sure.
The issue that's caused a lot of grief is that a lot of companies set up what pretty much accounts to shell companies in Ireland, with the bare minimal operations they can get away with, and route massive amounts of revenue through it in creative ways that have nothing to do with where the actual operations and revenues of the company are.
I know you havent mentioned anyone specifically. But companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft employ hundreds if not thousands of people here.
Maestro is fast becoming redundant, so we decided not to push for support: "This effectively means that practically no UK banks will be issuing Maestro cards, except in Northern Ireland." —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
This is a little off topic I admit, but ... how do people make those little book images - is there a service online to give you back a paperback book with your title on it?
I made the image in Gimp and then uploaded it to http://www.myecovermaker.com and generated that image. It's $5 if you want to remove the watermark but it's well worth it, since there's no way I would be able to make that myself.
I'm a co-founder at Teddle, one of the companies mentioned in the press release.
When we started Teddle the landscape for payments in the UK looked very very different. At one point PayPal looked like our best option. In reality their product would have killed our business (matching customers with independent house cleaners), with their punitive withholding of funds and lengthy clearing times.
Then Andy and the guys at Stripe UK came along and blew the competition out of the water. They have been doing an outstanding job. The product is ridiculously good, the documentation is awesome and the customer service is human, friendly and reliable. Honestly I can't praise the product enough.
Oh man... I love that Stripe is finally coming to Europe.
BUT seriously (going on a disappointed rant here): Belgium & the Netherlands get into private beta and Germany gets nothing? I mean: Come on. BE + NL together have 27m people - Germany has some 80m AND a world-class economy. I don't want to bash on our neighbors (God knows we've done that one or two times in the past), I just want me some Stripe.
I know that the delay is probably because of some ridiculous red tape in Germany. :-(
tl;dr: Please absolve us from PayMill & the Samwer brother
No idea but one thing Germany is famous for is the low adoption of credit cards vs direct debit (ELV) etc - more so than most European countries. German's tend to find it a deal breaker (locally) if you are a payment gateway that only supports credit cards. So that could be one reason why but just a guess.
n.b. we were talking about DIRECT DEBIT (which is something else entirely from debit cards).
You basically allow a company to directly withdraw money from your bank account (assuming sufficient funds on the account)
Could someone people explain the appeal of Stripe? The APIs are nice, but so a most other payment providers.
The fee Stripe charges are pretty high. We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price. The fact that you can't change who process you credit card payments (can you?) excludes you from getting any good deals on fees. If you shop around you can save a lot of money.
Honestly getting a merchant account, if that's the excuse for using Stripe, isn't that hard.
>We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price.
Is that really realistic? I thought all credit card transaction fees were percentage, while most ACH is fixed-rate (so if someone is charging you a percentage on ACH, you are getting screwed.)
My wife has a merchant account. It's not that the published "fees" are high -- I think she pays something like 20p / transaction. It's the crazy confusing other charges she has to put up with, like monthly fees which seem to me to be random, bogus insurance changes, hire of the terminal etc etc. It ends up costing a lot, and it's highly opaque.
If stripe has a transparent charging structure, that would be a massive plus to me.
Our total fees for all of the admittedly less than transparent charges never amount to more than 1% each month, and they are proportional to the number of transactions not revenue so that will decrease as we grow.
We pay basically the same % fee for our merchant account (maybe 2.2%), plus per transaction fees for the merchant account, plus an annual fee and per transactions fees to the gateway, plus an annual fee and per transaction fees to our recurring billing provider.
Do you know if you get better rates that the 2.4 / 2.5% Stripe charges, if you choose a different provider?
You could use a company like PayEx, NetAxept, DIBS or ePay ( there are many more of cause ). You pay them a flat fee per transaction, I know at least one of them will do it for a fixed monthly fee and $0.04 per transaction. The you need someone to handle the actual merchant account, someone like Teller, SwedBank, Handelsbank ( again there are many more ). Many of these will process VISA and MasterCard for less than 1% of the amount and in some case a lot less.
Stripe is wonderfully simple, but if you want to process any real amount of credit cards they seem really expensive. For quickly starting up I get why you would go with Stripe.
If you're getting cheaper offers from other providers, you should get in touch with us (support@stripe.com). We can do volume discounts, but we can also just help you compare prices - many other providers have cheaper sticker prices, but because they frequently have other fees, we'll often come out cheaper than you think.
We can do that too! (We can't specifically do SEK yet, although we're working on it - should have it soon)
We've tried to make all of this as easy as possible - you can associate bank accounts in different currencies with your Stripe account. If you make a charge in a currency you have a bank account for, we'll transfer it directly; otherwise we'll convert to your account's default currency and transfer it to that currency's bank account.
We done have some special needs though, so I doubt Stripe is right for us. We need a few more currencies and we expect to have the money transferred without any currency conversion ( If the customer pays in Swedish Kronor, we want the amount transferred to us in that currency ). Also we need support for at least one local card.
It's not meant as a put down or anything, I just fail so see what the big deal is with Stripe.
My company processes around EUR 600-850k a year solely via credit card. It's our third largest payment method, after SEPA (wire transfer within Europe) and direct debit. We use Santander's platform to process credit card payments and pay just under 0.7%. So "yes", you can get better rates, but these numbers come with strings attached such as having the payroll account with them, paying a big bunch of suppliers via them, etc. Nonetheless, the numbers work great for us.
Unless you're ultra low volume I can't see why anybody would pay a percentage rate when you can use something like SagePay and pay 10p per transaction. It would be an order of magnitude more expensive to use this for us, so what have I missed?
My other half's business uses Sagepay for online payments (for which we pay a flat £25 a month - or about 3p per transaction) against merchant services (where card fees are paid) through GlobalPayments into an HSBC business account.
We have just under a thousand transactions a month for totals just into five figures, both in store and online, and we pay around £140 a month in fees. As a proportion it's not gone over 1% of the total in the last year. That covers _everything_, including card fees, online fees, the instore pdq machine, support etc. Only a small proportion of transactions are credit cards, most by far is debit.
It's not a straight comparison with Stripe, because Stripe doesn't provide any of the instore stuff.
What appeal ought Stripe to have to us? Why would we pay 2.4%? Genuine questions.
I have noticed very cheap quotes before that will then say plus interchange. Interchange is what the card companies charge the provider and you are probably looking at about .6% average just through those.
Awesome, congrats guys. We have been using the BETA since the start and its been very good.
If anyone from Stripe is reading, in your announcement you say:
"In addition to keeping the best parts, we've also built multi-currency support: the ability for UK businesses to charge customers around the world in US dollars, British pounds, and Euro. We'll automatically handle all the conversions for you and deposit daily into your bank account."
My understanding was that we would need a USD account in the UK in order to charge customers in USD. Have you now fixed that? I can't find anything in the docs? Or are you saying that we can just charge people GBP no matter where in the world they are?
In the docs https://stripe.com/docs/api#create_charge there is no reffrence to exchange rates. Do you return a response that shows what the exchange rate was and so how much we will be paid in GBP after charging in USD? (paypal (yuck) do this)
Ah, yes. I was distracted by cake in the office and missed that this is a new endpoint on the API. I thought you were talking about the transfers endpoint.
Do you disclose anywhere the basis for calculating the FX transaction rate? I'd be interested to know how you do this before actually having a clients transaction convert.
Just specify a different currency in your charge and everything else will automatically do the right thing -- it should be a 3-char change. (We'll automatically convert charges to the currency of your bank account.)
I don't understand this, you can put decent volume through a forex broker and get conversions at something like .1% Surely it would make sense to do this at cost for customers?
Granted your bank will probably want a decent chunk for doing the conversion for you.
This is great! I have been waiting for this for a loooooong time! I hope they will come also to other European countries soon. But at least in UK! This is great!
I'd really be interested in knowing why it's not "Stripe EU" instead. What sort of problems they had trying to do that, and what needs improvement for that to become reality.
Mostly because there's a bunch of subtlety around bank transfers and identity verification. The EU simplifies a lot of the regulatory framework but the actual operations still entail a decent amount of heterogeneity from country-to-country.
We're in private beta in France and Ireland. (I work at Stripe.) We try to make sure that things are very comprehensively tested before we allow public signups.
Great news, although I work now for a somewhat competitor.
Anyway I do more and more api for my personal projects (thanks to AngularJS and mobile) and the Stripe api & docs have been my main inspirations and technical references.
It's a very good alternative and I'm very that more of the best-of-breed payment providers are expanding outside the US/Canada.
There's also the German Stripe clone, Paymill. Also, not every country is heavy on credit/debit cards (think, Poland, Japan, etc) and Adyen is able to support all kinds of local payment methods.
I would love to use this but the pricing is a bit of a problem. The Visa credit price per transaction is only a little bit higher but almost half our transactions are Visa debit which are charged by our existing provider at a flat rate of 34p + 10p for the gateway. The Stripe cost for a £60 transaction would be £1.64. The pricing needs to take into account the higher rate of debit card usage in the UK.
If you mostly export (i.e sell abroad), there are some additional considerations for picking a payment provider (I speak from the point of view of a UK company).
We've been using Shareit for selling software for many, many years and it's basically 4.9% as fees. The first interesting part for me is the currency conversion rate. We operate in GBP and all of our sales last month were in USD. Working out the average rate we got 1.54 USD to 1 GBP. Looking at the exchange rates for July [0] that seems reasonably close to the mid market rate.
I'd be interested to know how Stripe determine their conversion rates. If it's mid-market then we're looking at 4.4% against 4.9%.
The next issue when exporting is whether you have to register formally in the country you're selling to in order to avoid withholding taxes [1]
The countries we've come up against this to date are the USA, Portugal and India. The volume we do with the US justifies registering with the IRS and making a W8-BEN form available to all companies we sell to.
The process for the US is doable and the volume we sell there easily justifies it. The process for Portugal is awful and the process for India comprises about 6-8 weeks of utter bureaucratic bullshit [2]. The sales volume from these countries were not worth going through the process.
If we didn't go through this process and sell directly in these countries the buyer would have to withhold a proportion of the purchase, usually around 20%.
Shareit is an actual reseller, legally. Stripe isn't, AFAIK. So, Shareit can deal with the admin in these countries and pass over the same amount they do as for any country. A few years ago, we hadn't heard of withholding taxes, it's becoming more and more common as countries try to clamp down on tax evasion.
It's more strictly enforced the larger the payment amount gets, but my point is to be aware of the legal differences in payment processing services regarding foreign withholding tax rules.
Edit : There's actually a third issue as well and that's whether your insurance covers you to take card information on your site (up to details regarding the type of SSL certificate you have installed) and, if it does, whether you comply with all the security constraints the policy imposes. You may find that the additional premium is more than the cost savings.
Withholding is also an issue for anyone selling services, such as software development.
I work for a US company whilst being in the UK, and a W8-BEN form took most of a day to finish, and I remember calling the IRS direct to help - and they were surprisingly helpful and courteous. Nothing like as bad as they are painted :-\
Yeah, I was surprised about the IRS too, when I called them about my W8-BEN.
With a long polish family name and residing in a city with a long German (with umlauts) name the whole call over a low quality transatlantic line wasn't a walk in the park. But the IRS employee always stayed nice and helpful. (I think the address entry took us good 20 minutes alone).
Can you please elaborate on why & how the withholding taxes in other countries are affecting you? I assume that you sell software or services from your company's web site.
Somehow this does not click with my CFO experience.
That's actually no longer true - as of today for UK users, we can convert USD to GBP or EUR before transferring it to you. Just create the charge with a currency of "usd", and as long as you haven't manually setup a USD bank account (which you probably haven't), everything should just work.
We use the live exchange rate at the time of the charge, and there's a 2% fee for currency conversion on top (compared to e.g. 2.5% from PayPal). You can how much you'll receive for each charge in GBP immediately afterwards.
What is now the difference between using Stripe and Paymill? Any objective benefit to using either?
asking this as an ex-Rocket guy with my own startup that needs payment integration soon. I've started the Paymill process but not sent the docs in yet.
-You usually don't need to "send the docs in" (being hungarian, they asked for my ID, but email was fine), which reduces time to launch
-After having launched with Paymill, production started throwing strange errors. Root cause analysis revealed, that they don't have USD / EUR acceptance enabled by default; and they asked for extra paperwork to have that. This is not a good problem to have when users are hitting the payment wall.
yeh but this problem can be easily solved. change the settings in your account, fill in the pdf & scan the form. sent overvia email - done. easy as that.
In theory, yes. But in practice we've been struggling for a month now to have Paymill's support enable USD support for one of our customers. After two weeks of silence, they came up with some excuse that the forms had some info missing. After sending those in for a second and a third time we've been told that at that point it'd be only a matter of 24 hours to have their fulfilling bank green light the USD account. That was ten days ago and since then, our emails keep being unanswered. At this point I even doubt, Paymill offers any real USD support at all. Being the startup that they are, the support for us has been ridiculously bad.
Paymill kind of got the idea right, but the execution sucks. Stuff in the API has strange names and the docs and examples are often not completely correct.
One thing we've hit is that there's a requirement to specify the first amount you're going to charge (which you might not know at that point) when you get a customer's CC data, that can be a real pain.
Am I right in thinking that Stripe has no option for a hosted payments page? This makes it much clearer to users that the site they are in does not process their credit card details correctly. I am aware of Stripe Checkout.
Yes I recognise having that option is an advantage, a major one for some cases (e.g. e-commerce). However I wouldn't be keen to put my credit card details in to a form on e.g. a blogger's website soliciting donations.
I think the problem is that Stripe is not a very well known brand yet (outside devs). So I can see your point where it's a global brand like PayPal or a well known bank/payment gateway in a country. But I'm not sure if you're nervous about putting your card details in that going to something called "Stripe" makes it seem much more trustworthy?
Interesting that Braintree went to the whole EU at once while Stripe seems to take it country by country.
Not sure if it's related but at around that time Braintree changed the pricing to add Interchange fee that depends on the card used, service offered etc. Making the final pricing somewhat confusing but maybe more affordable as a result.
Does anyone know if Stripe account setup&approval for UK is just as straightforward as for US? With Braintree they ask for financial (turnover & EBIT) and shareholder information when applying as an EU company, no idea if it's also the case for US companies.
One thing to note with Braintree though is that they rolled out in the EU with a flat pricing, but a few months later changed it to having a minimum 100EUR in transaction fees. That is a very big change and it becomes not a good alternative for a small company to start with. Stripe has higher fees but no fixed fees.
Why is Stripe so interesting? As far as I can tell, they still only offer one payment method, credit cards.
That makes them quite uncompetitive in most countries where credit cards are just one of the many online payment methods, and completely useless in countries where most only payment has already shifted to direct transfers without the cost and hassle of going through credit card companies.
The movement is now towards harmonizing direct payments and mobile payment. Using credit cards for online payment feels so yesterday to me.
Take a look at what http://gocardless.com are doing with Direct Debit in the UK. Not sure what "mobile payment" really means, outside of in-app purchases?
I've been using their beta for my startup, the API is amazing. I've only tested it with my own cards, but it's worked a treat (my SaaS isn't solid to be released yet).
Stripe's pricing starts at 2.4% + £0.20 per transaction + VAT. Stripe charges 2% for foreign conversions (i.e. charging in EUR, when you want to be paid out in GBP).
PayPal's pricing starts at 3.4% + £0.20 per transaction. In addition to their published rate, you'll also pay:
* £20 per month if you want to design and host your own checkout pages.
Any plans to roll out in Norway soon? All alternatives here have a very poor technical offering (bad docs, SOAP, errors, downtime) and are expensive for low volume.
We are looking for a payment provider we can integrate in http://makeplans.net but it has to be with no fixed costs as our clients are small businesses. Please get in touch if you need someone to be part of the beta rollout here in Norway: espen@makeplans.no
So, it depends on which tier you're on for PayPal, it may go either way. However, I suspect most people are sitting on 3.4%+20p on PayPal will find Stripe cheaper.
Never mind PayPal, they're more expensive than the commodity players in the UK, like SagePay.
Stripe's strategy is all about developer-led adoption, and their approach to their tech belies this. Unfortunately, in reality, developers have as much say as to which PSP their client uses as the cabin boy does what course the captain should sail.
I run an eCommerce firm - we've mooted stripe to all of our customers, as we like the look of their approach - but none will adopt, purely on the basis of cost.
For stripe to be more expensive than Paypal I'd need to bill 15,000 a month.
That is a nice problem to have (and in fairness it's a .5% different or about about 75 quid).
On 15,000 billable I'll take a 300 a month hit to never have to deal with PayPal again.
Broken sandbox, flaky API, customer service reps from the Hannibal Lecter school of customer service, payment frozen, ridiculous demands on holding cash and proving you are who you say you are, high pressure sales.
Screw PayPal, I'll drive to my customer and take cash before I use them again.
I've actually had a different experience where clients are now requesting Stripe. My situation is unique in that across various sites clients got to experience PayPal, Braintree and Stripe. Due to a range of reasons with the flow of PayPal subscriptions to the phone nature and fee structure on Braintree (they might have simplified it now), Stripe is turning out to be the favorite even with the 7 day transfers.
There are also cases where developers do have some say, especially since many clients don't even care as long as they can accept payments--the fee is more or less on par. It's a favorite for me because when you look at Stripe.js + the API you can tell it was developed for use by other developers and not as an after thought.
Aye - our clients tend to be of the bigger, more established ilk, and as a result tend to either bring whatever odd solution they've selected along to the party. Regularly find ourselves integrating with Barclays and HSBC's Arcot-driven house of horrors, even though we'd never, ever, ever recommend either of them under any circumstances.
We have a few clients who are smaller, and therefore more willing to listen to recommendations and suggestions, but the big guys just steamroll on with whatever the advertorial in the trade journal told them to do this month. Very hard to convince a 40 year veteran FD that you know more about payment solutions than him.
Hmmm. Shameless self plug here but you sound like some Spreedly customers' we have. Your developers just work with our API's to avoid the arcane payment gateway API's but your customer doesn't have to change their processor/gateway relationship.
If you're doing typical e-commerce -- as opposed to, say, SaaS -- the cost of payment processing seems especially important, since it might eat into your (typically low) margins. Why would you recommend Stripe over an established, cheaper processor?
Reliability and redundancy. We always recommend that each client has at least two PSPs enabled, with PayPal typically as the fallback/secondary. SagePay have a long and sad history of "we broke it", which is only just made up for by their low costs. You lose way more margin being unable to transact than you do on processing fees.
For what it's worth, a lot of our bigger users (from MoMA to Walmart) ended up using Stripe because their developers successfully pushed it internally.
Could you drop me a line? patrick@stripe.com. I have an idea I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on.
We'd love to move to Stripe; the one issue is that you can't send us $USD to our UK based $USD account via a wire transfer (like Amex does for example). Instead, it seems the only option is for you to send us £GBP after charging another 2% on top. This is both expensive currency conversion; but we also spend $USD so have to pay to turn our £GBP back into $USD!
I'm an engineer at Braintree. The way I see it when you compare Braintree and Stripe in the UK:
- Stripe has instant signup. Braintree does not (yet). You have to send us a few documents; the signup process takes a few days.
- Stripe multicurrency support is limited to USD, EUR, and GBP. Braintree can accept payments in 130 currencies and settle in the following currencies:
AUD - Australian dollar
CAD - Canadian dollar
DKK - Danish krone
CHF - Switzerland francs
EUR - European Union euro
GBP - British pound
HKD - Hong Kong dollar
JPY - Japanese yen
NOK - Norwegian krone
NZD - New Zealand dollar
SEK - Swedish krona
USD - US dollar
ZAR - South African rand
Being able to settle in DKK, CHF, NOK or SEK might make a big difference to merchants with large customer bases in Northern Europe.
- Stripe charges a 2% currency conversion fee if you settle in a different currency than you present. Braintree does not.
- The pricing structures are different. Stripe charges 2.4% + 20p per charge; Braintree charges on an interchange plus model: IC + 0.9% + 10p, with a 100 GBP monthly minimum.
Finally, of course, our products are different as well. Braintree.js and Stripe.js don't work the same way, and our APIs have different capabilities.
The 100 EUR minimum fee per month in Europe was a show-stopper for us. We were about to develop an integration with Braintree in our SaaS (http://makeplans.net - online appointment scheduling) but as our clients are small and have little volume Braintree was not an option after changing from no fixed fees to 100 EUR / month.
GoCardless and Stripe tend to solve very different problems. We're a Direct Debit provider, whereas Stripe do card payments.
In short, Direct Debit is great for recurring payments and variable billing. It's traditionally really hard to get access to in the UK if you're a smaller business; but we allow people to sign up instantly and start using it without having to go to the bank.
DD is a great solution if you're in a service business or are charging a similar set of people each month. It's a less good solution if you're doing e-commerce/physical goods, since you need fast payment timings/clearing. That's the sort of problem cards (and therefore Stripe) are optimized for.
Also, according to Stripe's Terms and Conditions, “the Stripe Service is not made available to persons … for personal, family or household purposes” — this isn’t the case for GoCardless, where signing up as an individual to collect gift payments by Direct Debit is A-OK.
Really excited about this because Stripe is the most popular gateway for our WordPress plugin and this opens new doors for many of our customers in the UK that don't wan't to use Paypal.
Just signed up. How crazy easy that was, no sending in a ton of information of waiting. Live account in 2mins. In fact it's cheaper than PayPal Pro! Paypal, Worldpay you are doomed!
You can already charge UK customers, but I presume you mean UK customers in GBP. This is on our roadmap to add. (Most of the heavy lifting is already done for the reverse in the UK.)
Adding to the people happy about this - we've been using the beta for a while, took us a couple of hours to integrate it. Really nice to work with with.
Ah, I'm in Northern Ireland. One of our main banks (Danske) issues Maestro as the only debit card option making it one of the most used cards here. Are there any plans to add support of has it been completely ruled out?
Edit: Did a bit of research and it looks like Danske is finally offering Visa Debit as an option.
