Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 463 posts

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#161

Post by jkestner »

malandrew wrote: post #64
tlrobinson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it’s also likely one of the largest and fastest transfers of wealth from small businesses to large corporations. As Amazon hires 100,000+ workers how many small businesses are shuttering for good? Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.

I don't understand this idolization of small over large (or vice versa for others). The thing that matters most is that businesses best satisfy their customers, whether they are small or large. There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company. I buy from small companies all the time and many of those that I do will likely survive because the…

Many small companies can serve a wider variety of customers more precisely. They also increase diversity so we don’t end up with a few large companies optimizing for their local maximum, which is rarely the market’s.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#162

Post by nickjj »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #142
nickjj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you planning to go through PayPal directly or Braintree? One thing I notice is, I get much less fraudulent payments through PayPal, and when I do get them it's handled automatically (and most of the time they end up being not fraud because PayPal investigated it and released the funds). 100% hands free, $0 in fees. With Stripe, not only do I get more fraudulent payments but you need to pay $15 as a dispute fee th…

Would you mind sharing your percentage of fraud with the two services? (I assume you are using Braintree.) Honestly, you are the first person to make a good case on using PayPal over Stripe. Especially with the arbitrary horror stories I hear about PayPal all the time. > It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only…

I use Stripe and PayPal currently but on the next platform I'm currently building I'm strongly (and very seriously) considering Braintree.

With PayPal, the fraud experience has been nothing short of amazing. Out of many many thousands of transactions, I've only had about 3 or 4 transactions get flagged as high risk by PayPal. What this means is PayPal will hold the funds, review the transaction and then either give you the funds if it's legit or do something else if it's not legit.

I've had 0 cases on PayPal where fraud / disputes actually took place. Of those 3-4 transactions, they were all released. None of this required any intervention by me. I just got notified by email from PayPal when a high risk transaction occurred. 100% of the funds were put back into my account a few days later (short of the normal 2.9% + 30c fees).

On Stripe, I've also had many many thousands of transactions. I've had a number of fraud transactions in the process which ended up as disputes. Stripe sends out an email letting you know, but then it's now on you to decide if you want to contest the dispute. This dispute typically happens when someone who got their credit card stolen sees an unknown charge in their records.

Now you need to fill out like 8 form fields and supply screenshots and server logs of proof that someone was accessing the material they've stolen (I sell digital courses so there's no physical item). The screenshots need to be sized perfectly to be displayed in portrait mode on a sheet of paper that gets faxed over to the person reviewing it from the bank, otherwise it'll be unreadable from their perspective and you'll auto-lose the case.

Stripe doesn't let you see a real preview of these screenshots and they even alter the uploaded image size in your preview which makes it hard to preview what it will look like from the reviewer's POV even though that's the only thing that matters.

After doing that, it takes about 2-3 months to get a resolution. You get charged a $15 bank dispute fee (on top of the full amount of the product of course) which is non-refundable unless you happen to win the dispute, but if someone got their card stolen then you're not going to win the case. You also don't get any information from Stripe about the review, other than you won or lost. Stripe says it's because banks don't give them any info beyond that. Fine, that's ok, but yeah the overall experience is very very bad.

Then on top of that, Stripe sells a Radar service that you need to pay extra on top of for each transaction to get better tools to help prevent fraud before it takes place. They choose not to give it to everyone because I guess they profit from dispute fees and fraudulent transactions.

The kick in the teeth is that the data Stripe uses to train their Radar / anti-fraud service is data provided by business owners who have trusted Stripe with their business. Now they are selling that data back to us in the form of insurance fees on each transaction (the Radar service you need to pay for).

I haven't personally used Braintree yet but from what I read in their docs, you get that type of anti-fraud service baked into the normal 2.9% + 30c (don't quote me on that, but it very much reads that way on their site).

Whatever PayPal is doing (and in turn Braintree since it's a PayPal service), they're doing a fantastic job at combating fraud and disputes, especially compared to Stripe.

> Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.

Their docs are typically good, but the SCA / Payment Intents docs are not really at the same standards as the rest of their documentation yet.

Come back in a few weeks when you've implemented it.

What's interesting is I run a podcast about running web apps in production and I've had a bunch of folks come on the show who use Stripe to accept payments.

All of them have said the experience with implementing SCA with Stripe was pretty rough. These are seasoned developers running successful platforms too.

They've all done it in the last couple of months as well.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#163

Post by lisper »

carapace wrote: post #115
lisper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO it is time to start promulgating the idea that electronic money transfer should be considered a basic human right just like free cash transactions have been since the invention of money. It already is that way in many advanced countries where electronic money transfer is a service provided by the government. It is only in the U.S. where a private monopolistic cartel is allowed to impose a private tax on all reta…

I can't believe I'm going to be "that guy" but, uh, bitcoin, eh? Rights aren't granted, they have to be taken. To the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas" (from the Simpsons): The yellow gold of Texas Is what I long to save. I will not pay no taxes If I hide it in a cave.

Bitcoin vs government service is a dispute over implementation, not principle. Personally I hew towards government, but it's important to be clear about what is actually being argued about otherwise the forces of evil will be able to divide and conquer.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#165

Post by alharith »

plantain wrote: post #136
pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

4) It's just way too expensive, in general, nowadays. Stripe's market leader position should allow it to negotiate lower fees, but for some reason doesn't seem to be part of the business plan.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#166

Post by mhb »

core-questions wrote: post #83
malandrew wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this idolization of small over large (or vice versa for others). The thing that matters most is that businesses best satisfy their customers, whether they are small or large. There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company. I buy from small companies all the time and many of those that I do will likely survive because the…

> There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company. Sure there is - in terms of where the profit goes. The profit in a small business goes to the owner(s), who usually live somewhere in the local community, and in turn that money stays within the community to be spent on other businesses there. When a Walmart comes along, the profits all mov…

For big public companies, the owners can be distributed in many communities.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#167

Post by rhizome »

kingbirdy wrote: post #140
jcrben wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish you could disintermediate credit card fees. I'm sort of hopeful that credit card surcharging might grow ( https://www.cardx.com/ ) and start competition on those costs.

I don't have strong feelings either way on having consumers pay CC processing fees, but encouraging them to use debit cards online seems irresponsible given the non-existent fraud protections on debit cards. Of course it's technically consumers' responsibility to know and trade off that risk versus the savings, but at least in the US the sad reality is that personal finance education is woefully lacking or non-existe…

Generally in the US, debit card fraud liability is limited to $500 if the card owner reports it within 60 days.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#168

Post by hooande »

pc wrote: post #52
tlrobinson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it’s also likely one of the largest and fastest transfers of wealth from small businesses to large corporations. As Amazon hires 100,000+ workers how many small businesses are shuttering for good? Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.

The impact of Covid-19 on many businesses around the world is very sad. That said, it's less clear to me that the medium-term impact will be pro-incumbent or pro-large company. Big incumbents tend to be less adaptable and to benefit from large fixed cost barriers to entry (e.g. real estate). We're seeing a lot of nimble small businesses migrate to online business models far faster than the behemoths they used to stru…

This is true, but the big incumbents will benefit from being able to buy up swaths of local business at a discount. Their advantages of scale will only increase

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#169

Post by saadalem »

if HNers are asking specifically for how to beat Stripe, Paypal in business I would say quite simply process more transactions or offer more flexible rates or services. Both are great companies that have grown into larger players. However, they still only account for a non material portion of total transaction value and volume when it comes to commerce. Therefore, they can be caught to in many areas. Take for example stripe. They are almost exclusively online and offer a bundled transaction rate. By simply focusing on areas like offline payments or more flexible/customizable rates a company could easily beat them.

For PayPal, they are much larger, you could do the same. You will not beat them over night but you can easily find niches where a more tailored approach would benefit the businesses rather than the broad strokes a company of that size has to take.

One area to look at for both would be online sales. Neither do that well at all. Another area to consider would be embedded experiences that require micro transactions. Stripe and PayPal are all but wedded to the payment networks at this time.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#170

Post by anonanon43 »

ryaniscool wrote: post #50

Stripe has great and interesting products but this valuation seems very high. They are competing with companies like Global Payments and First Data but they aren't disrupting them. First Data has a lower market cap than this with $9B in annual revenue and $1B in annual profit.

I'm aware of a large org actively moving the bulk of $3bn in volume from FiServ (formerly First Data) to Stripe. Stripe's valuation is higher because of their trajectory. FiServ isn't innovating- at all. Just more attempts at lipstick on the pig.
Post reply on HN