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Ask HN: How do you process payments?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#111

Post by Taig »

rwieruch wrote: post #104

Stripe whenever it's possible. However, without PayPal one is missing a bug chunk of people who cannot pay with credit card. Hence, I offer both. Since I implemented both (again) over the last month, here a list of my resources: - Stripe Elements [0] + Stripe Webhook [1] - Stripe Checkout [2] + Stripe Webhook [1] - PayPal Smart Payment Buttons [3] And one repository: - basic Stripe Checkout with Webhook in React + Ex…

Could you elaborate a bit for which reasons you prefer Stripe over PayPal and why it makes sense to offer both? I am currently trying to decide on a payment service but having a hard time making a sensible decision. The way I understand it PayPal supports more countries and may thus be accessible to more customers. Fees between Stripe and PayPal seem to be identical for US transactions; for international transactions things tend to get more complicated.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#112

Post by ksahin »

robhunter wrote: post #35
koolba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value do you get from a middle man between you and the raw Stripe API? Why recommend them? From what you describe it just seems like a hassle with them acting as gatekeeper to your own historical transaction records.

Customers need invoices, A/R tracking, recurring payments, line items on an invoice, billing for multiple entities, adhoc products/add-ons - a billing system and a way to process payments are separate things. I believe Stripe does more and more of this stuff, but it isn't cheap and in our experience Chargebee has perfected a lot of that functionality.

+ VAT management, self-serve portal etc. Chargebee is really great

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#113

Post by tehbeard »

wildduck wrote: post #110
rwieruch wrote: post #104

Stripe whenever it's possible. However, without PayPal one is missing a bug chunk of people who cannot pay with credit card. Hence, I offer both. Since I implemented both (again) over the last month, here a list of my resources: - Stripe Elements [0] + Stripe Webhook [1] - Stripe Checkout [2] + Stripe Webhook [1] - PayPal Smart Payment Buttons [3] And one repository: - basic Stripe Checkout with Webhook in React + Ex…

>Personally I preferred Stripe Checkout over Elements, because they take care about the look and feel. Stripe Checkout force you to gave client email to stripe. With Elements you can just use stripe for card processing (with zipcode of course).

Stripe checkout handles sending a receipt though iirc? So it's not like the email is winding up on a shadowy marketing list run by them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#115

Post by rl3 »

disillusioned wrote: post #78

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…

>... 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.)

That's bad. It deserves media attention.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#116

Post by karambir »

Our company is based out of India selling online courses for Data Science community and we use two payment providers: Instamojo and Paypal. Instamojo is for Indian cards and Paypal is for international payments. We could have used Instamojo for all payments but many customers like using Paypal as they don't have to worry about saving credit card information with some random payment provider.

Stripe just came out of private beta in India but their processing fees are pretty high. We are looking at two providers as they are promising better fees. Razorpay and Payu:

- Razorpay is pretty much Stripe of India with the documentation and UI similar to Stripe.

- Payu is an old dog in Indian Payment Industry with good sales team but bad integration and overall product.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#117

Post by tehbeard »

Taig wrote: post #111
rwieruch wrote: post #104

Stripe whenever it's possible. However, without PayPal one is missing a bug chunk of people who cannot pay with credit card. Hence, I offer both. Since I implemented both (again) over the last month, here a list of my resources: - Stripe Elements [0] + Stripe Webhook [1] - Stripe Checkout [2] + Stripe Webhook [1] - PayPal Smart Payment Buttons [3] And one repository: - basic Stripe Checkout with Webhook in React + Ex…

Could you elaborate a bit for which reasons you prefer Stripe over PayPal and why it makes sense to offer both? I am currently trying to decide on a payment service but having a hard time making a sensible decision. The way I understand it PayPal supports more countries and may thus be accessible to more customers. Fees between Stripe and PayPal seem to be identical for US transactions; for international transactions…

Not op, but my 2 cents.

Stripe's developer UX is godly, from api docs to the dashboard it's something all B2B companies that offer APIs should aspire to.

Secondly, with stripe elements it can be styled into the website much nicer than PayPal buttons.

PayPal does support more countries and still has some brand recognition with customers as "a safe way to pay online", but between the bad UX for both business and developer, as well as their tendency to randomly freeze accounts, we try to dissuade clients away from it unless it's a significant revenue stream.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#118

Post by rglullis »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #10
maxmalysh wrote: post #6

Bitcoin.

How many payments have you processed? I thought Bitcoin died as a payment medium. People have figured out that the overhead is only about $0.50 if you're willing to wait, but most consumer apps don't make it easy to default to the lower fee. (I haven't looked into this for some time, so that last paragraph is a bit dated.)

Lightning is changing that, and hopefully Ethereum's Raiden will soon be released and bring the possibility to use stablecoins for off-chain transfers as well.

Disclaimer and shameless plug: I was working on Raiden last year and now I am working on a self-hosted payment gateway that can leverage Raiden (https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20)

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#119

Post by rglullis »

echelon wrote: post #19
qwerty456127 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth mentioning that today "you're willing to wait" actually means just some minutes. I've actually started using BitCoin to pay for things recently and I was surprised to find out how easy and quick this actually is. This really is a no-bullshit electronic cash. No registration, no verification, no borders, quick and easy. I hope more goods and services are going to be offered for cryptocurrencies in future.

How do you deal with the price volatility?

On the Ethereum blockchain, things are a little easier. You can always use a stabletoken like DAI.

On the BTC blockchain, this can be a real problem. The best one can do is to hope that the BTC price doesn't swing more than the equivalent fee amount of a credit card transaction to make it worthwhile.

If you are willing to keep some of your crypto on an exchange (but remember, it is only really your crypto if you have the keys), you can try to automate the swap between BTC stablecoin to reduce the exposure to price swings.

Re: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

#120

Post by rkangel »

We used GoCardless to set up Direct Debits. We were taking large-ish recurring payments (£100s) and GoCardless was the cheapest as they cap at £2 a transaction.

Their service was great and was trivial to interact with. We were working only in the UK, and Direct Debit isn't available everywhere but GoCardless offers some equivalent in a lot of countries.

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