Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by laurencerowe » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

alanpearce wrote: post #240

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true Germany uses cash a lot more than other countries, but I wasn't trying to say we don't do card payments. I just said we don't use credit cards, we use debit cards instead which come by default with any standard bank account. However, these cards are neither MasterCard nor Visa and therefore do not work in online payment scenarios. I have a credit card, but it is paid in full at the end of the month automati…

For anyone confused about the debit card comment: A German debit card isn’t the same as any other. It doesn’t have Visa or MasterCard co-branding like other countries’ debit card, nor a 16 digit number, so it can’t be used online. I would rather have translated Girokarte to bank card, because there are actual debit cards with Visa/MC co-branding which are available in Germany, but less common than other kinds

Are debit card only German retailers supporting Visa / MasterCard debit cards now?

Many UK banks used to issue Switch/Maestro cards which interoperated with the German bank card system so were accepted in German supermarkets, but these got phased out for Visa / MasterCard debit around 10 years ago meaning I had to start using cash everywhere.

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

#332

Post by AnssiH » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

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…

Probably not news to Stripe and not a priority, but just thought I'd mention it:

The only reason we are not using Stripe is the lack of support for Finnish payment methods - around 70% of our retail website customers pay using the local "bank buttons" and 10% use local mobile payments (MobilePay, Pivo).

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

#333

Post by nickjj » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

hnick wrote: post #327

nickjj wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

My experience mightn't be typical but I recently had a dispute on Stripe that went a lot smoother. A customer disputed 3 monthly subscription transactions. After providing evidence it was resolved in our favour within a week. I had low hopes because the server logs were long gone (over 90 days). However I had logs from our email provider showing reads and clicks from our emails so I sent a screenshot of that. I said…

All of what you provided as proof was what I submit too.

I've won 100% of the disputes where it was pretty clear the person wanted to just grab the content for free and then do a charge back. The problem is Stripe not blocking the real fraudulent transactions where a bad actor stole someones credit card and signed up with that. These are the ones where I've lost 100% of the time (for good reason since it was fraud). Stripe didn't prevent those from occurring where as PayPal has blocked every single fraudulent transaction before it took place and I didn't have to sign up for extra fees or lift a finger to get that protection.

To my understanding (and I may be wrong) with Braintree the customer would still see PayPal's branding if they check out via PayPal. They would see something like this: https://articles.braintreepayments.com/img/developers/pay-wi...

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

#334

Post by chrischen » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

olivierrg wrote: post #257

nickjj wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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. Stripe PM on the Payment Intents API here. You're right that there were some rough edges when we started rolling out this new API last year. SCA is complex and we want to help make it easy to navigate this regulation: we designed the new APIs to abstract away as much of the…

One of the main tough things with the SCA / Payment Intents is that we have to keep our payment state in sync with Stripe's (updating the amount to charge and syncing with the cart total), and then syncing with a webhook. The transaction apparently happens in a separate process from the customer's browser session.

With PayPal you simply send a request for a certain amount, and when it gets approved the customer's client comes back with a token and you choose to execute it or not. If you don't execute, the charge just isn't completed.

Stripe's docs says to not depend on the client because the client can close the browser window. In the PayPal case, if that happens, the transaction is simply canceled (since the client closed before finishing).

EDIT: It looks like Stripe's docs do support the PayPal style integration, but recommends against it because it doesn't work with longer-delay asynchronous methods. It's funny because PayPal's old API was done in this way (with instant payment notification webhooks) and their new API is closer to Stripe's old API.

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

#335

Post by kmfrk » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #69

fbelzile wrote: post #55

I'm very happy with Stripe and for their success, but I plan on switching all my payments to go through PayPal again. I did some math and PayPal offers a better deal for Canadian businesses after Stripe bumps me off of their grandfathered conversion fees in a couple months. I love the slick interface, but it's simply not worth the thousands per year I'll be saving with the switch. For me the main selling point for an…

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…

I was gonna ask pc directly about this, but chargebacks are a major vector of online abuse especially for livestreaming/influencer donations and such, and I was wondering how well Stripe's Chargeback Protection has worked to defeat this if anyone's signed up for the 0.4% cut to get around this. Is it a no-brainer, what's people's experiences been, and are there other trade-offs than a bigger cut for Stripe (and less agonizing over chargebacks)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20082032

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

#336

Post by govind-stripe » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

fbelzile wrote: post #245

swat535 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you saving fees on paypal ? Looking at https://www.paypal.com/ca/for-you/fees It looks like the fees are exactly the same as Stripe, what am I missing ? Can you elaborate ? Are you a charitable organization?

A majority of my sales are from US customers buying in USD. With PayPal, fees are: 3.7% + $0.30 USD With Stripe, fees are: 2.9% + $0.30 CAD + 0.6% (international card charge) + 2.0% (currency conversion fee)

To add to Ken's comment, you can add a USD bank account (in addition to your CAD account) in your dashboard settings and your USD transactions will settle into USD without any conversion fees. If you click on 'Add bank account' in the payouts tab [0], there's an option to add a USD account. CAD transactions will automatically settle in the CAD account associated with Stripe. USD transactions will automatically settle in your USD account associated with Stripe.

[0]https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payouts

Source: I work at Stripe

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

#337

Post by adambyrtek » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

pawelk wrote: post #326

adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

I live in Poland. I do (contactless) card payments every day, I rarely even have cash in my wallet. But I don't have a credit card and most of my peers / family doesn't have one either. Our debit cards will usually not work for on-line payments (the type that requires card number + cvv). We do, however, have a widely adopted system called Blik[1], which is instant mobile payments (incl. POS payments, the terminals ar…

Most debit cards in Poland are standard Visa or Mastercard and definitely work online, sometimes you just need to activate them before the first payment for security reasons, but you're right that Blik seems to be getting more and more traction recently.

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

#338

Post by cercatrova » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #267

wilg wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. We've moved to Paddle which takes care of that for us. Recommend!

We looked into Paddle recently as a possible way of handling the payment mechanics and the tax and compliance issues for a new business. It looked quite promising on both of those fronts. Then we read their legal terms, found about half a dozen obvious deal-breakers, and lost all interest.

I'm not familiar with Paddle versus Stripe, what are (some of) the dealbreakers? And does Stripe not have these same dealbreakers?

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

#339

Post by jackerman » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

stevoski wrote: post #288

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…

Hey Patrick, It would be great if Stripe Checkout included VAT-related features: * Detect country and - if needed - add appropriate VAT * Allow customer to add a valid VAT number, so that when appropriate tax is not charged * Offer clear reporting on what VAT has been collected for each jurisdiction I realise this is a big, big can of worms. But that’s why we use Stripe, right? For help handling that big can of worms…

Josh here from the Stripe Checkout team. We're actively thinking about VAT-related features for Checkout. We'd love to chat; drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com

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

#340

Post by chrisjarvis » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

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…

Using Stripe Checkout (where you create a stripe session on ur server and redirect the client to stripe to complete payment and then listen for a Webhook that says the checkout session was completed) was so amazingly easy to setup and use. My app that uses it will up and running soon, Stripe has been a pleasure to use so far!