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Ask HN: How do you process payments?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#71

Post by sleighboy »

hex1848 wrote: post #11

Authorize.Net is what we've used for online payments and our internal subscription processing for over a decade. API is easy to use. Never really had any downtime. Rates are competitive. No one has come along and given us much of a reason to change.

They could really use someone who gives a damn to focus on their official libraries. They seem to have tried to make them function similar no matter which language you use. Not the smartest move, they end up being sort of convoluted in languages like Python. Which lead to many people starting a client library, but probably moving on from using them and the libs go unmaintained.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#72

Post by tzs »

hex1848 wrote: post #11

Authorize.Net is what we've used for online payments and our internal subscription processing for over a decade. API is easy to use. Never really had any downtime. Rates are competitive. No one has come along and given us much of a reason to change.

Have they added support for the Visa stored credential framework [1]?

Last I saw on their forums, a few months ago, a few people has asked about it but Authorize.Net didn't have anything yet. (Support has been kind of spotty in general among payment processors [2]).

I was going to check their forums again to see if anything has changed, but the forum link on their developer site is giving me a 404 right not.

[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/documents...

[2] https://3dmerchant.com/blog/cenpos/which-payment-gateways-su...

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#76

Post by waffle_ss »

Stripe when possible, but for a recent project I’m using Dwolla, which operates strictly via ACH (which makes it US-only).

The problem with Stripe is they have a large list of prohibited businesses, which mainly is inherited from the credit card networks as I understand it. Even if you’re a perfectly legal and legitimate business, if you fall under one of these broad categories you can’t use Stripe’s platform (even if you only use their ACH product and don’t touch credit cards). PayPal has a similar list.

The credit card networks justify it by claiming certain categories of business are riskier (and I’m sure some are). But then you see how a lot of these categories may have come from Operation Chokepoint, chosen by unelected bureaucrats seemingly without any evidence.

Personally it disturbs me that so many legitimate businesses are severely hamstrung from collecting payments online because of extremely opaque decisions by an oligopoly of payment networks.

But about Dwolla - it’s not quite as smooth as Stripe; you have to build out your own customer onboarding screens, and production plans are priced through a sales rep rather than a SaaS-y paygo model. But I feel much more in control from the business end of things using them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#77

Post by kf »

conductr wrote: post #66
kf wrote: post #50

The FDA/DEA have waged war on the kratom industry in extralegal fashion; I've had my personal bank accounts and credit cards shut down without explanation via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point . With Operation Chokepoint over, the DEA/FDA still have colluded to prevent the kratom industry from processing credit cards. For my website www.getkratom.com, we take checks, echecks, and cryptocurrency. Sal…

If you created a obfuscated company name GTKTM, INC and created a Stripe account and a front as some legit SAAS/products but really ran through the charges for your Katom product sales... wonder how long you could fly under the radar.

There are high risk merchant processors that specialize in enabling things like this but it isn't happening, visa/mastercard have really colluded under pressure from the feds to try really hard to make sure that no kratom merchants have credit card processing under any circumstances whatsoever.

At my sales volume I can't reasonably fly under the radar this way; I'm sure a tiny or start up operation could for at least a little while but it's not sustainable.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#78

Post by disillusioned »

For my consulting business (average invoice size of anywhere from $15k-$125k), we exclusively accept paper checks, ACH (either as a direct credit for larger companies set up to do that,) or QuickBooks Online, which makes ACH relatively trivial, and they charge basically $1 to process it. Can't beat that with a stick.

For our clients, our preference is still Stripe, though we had a client deplatformed by them because their bank had problems with the product. (In our case, specifically, adult toys.) We had spoken with Stripe at length before investing in using them, and confirmed that this would be acceptable, as they had other adult toy companies on their platform, but Wells Fargo, paragons of fucking virtue that they are, decided to step in an try to get extremely and very awkwardly hands on with our specific products. (They tried to dictate what colors we could and couldn't offer, for instance. It was unpleasant, and we recognized we needed to leave immediately.)

We ended up back at a higher-risk merchant service provider, though we're paying typical rates because we fulfill an actual, physical product (not, say, porn), and our chargeback rate is very low. Still a frustrating experience, and yet another reason to hate Wells.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#79

Post by kf »

seibelj wrote: post #70
kf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been meaning to try and fix the wikipedia article again. I last did that and got into an obnoxious fight with jytdog. I heard a couple months ago that he dox'd and called to harass a wikipedian and then deleted his account ahead of anticipated punitive action. Without that person spending 80 hours a week to advocate his particularly narrow anti-plant medicine interpretation of what is correct with regards to med…

Ping me sometime for coffee if you are in Boston, I am a real person. Stay safe out there

Cheers. I'm in the Bay Area and don't make it east too often (Love Burn Miami is happening though!), happy to meet for coffee in SF/Oakland next time you come out these ways.

Frankly, I've been in the legal drug space running www.getkratom.com for 13 years and things are fine because the plant actually is so profoundly safe. Orrin Hatch plus lots of veterans of the US armed forces calling their representatives is what saved it from a federal ban. It already went through that due process and didn't get banned.

Running a crypto hedge fund feels more dangerous to me in many ways that my simple, though controversial, ecommerce business. :) I'm doing fine and must like living on the edge.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#80

Post by fyfy18 »

I've been selling a SaaS product for the last four years. Originally I used Stripe but recently switched to Paddle.

The main reason is that it makes my life a lot easier, they act as a reseller so I effectively sell my product to them, and they sell it on to customers. At the end of each month I just need to enter a single payment into my accounting platform, and they handle all currency conversions (I sell in USD, my accounting is in GBP) and sales taxes. They of course charge more, but for the amounts I'm talking about the cost outweighs the time I was spending dealing with Stripe payments.

They also support PayPal which I've had a lot of people ask for, so that's a win too.

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