341–350 of 463 posts
They're worth how much!? Forgive me but how is this worth that much?
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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.
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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.
When the EU capped the interchange fees in 2015, many retailers started accepting MasterCard and Visa here. AMEX is exempt from the regulation since it's a three-party system and less commonly accepted. I'm not aware of any retailers that accept MC/Visa debit, but not credit cards or vice versa.
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We started https://do.delivery/ to offer an online ordering option to locked down businesses, using Stripe Connect. Now all I can think about is other ways to use Connect. Many established businesses have broader e-commerce needs but I’ve seen farmers offer vege boxes and meal packs to great local support. Many smaller businesses are wary of investing much to start.
What did you build the landing page with? Looks very nice.
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Another German. We use "cards" all the time. But these are just cashless and tied to our SEPA accounts (so not a credit card).
>But these are just cashless and tied to our SEPA accounts (so not a credit card). which wouldn't be a problem for shopping online if they had a Visa or MasterCard cobrand, as these can be debit and tied to your bank account as well. It's only slowly changing with some Sparkassen issuing MasterCard debit cobranded cards in late fall ( https://www.f-i.de/News/ITmagazin/Archiv/2020/Einfach-mobil-... )
That's a peculiar choice, but I assume the decision was made to appeal to the typically skeptical German market. I do wonder why it wasn't made opt-in, though.
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I'm not so sure about the tremendous benefits of having locally-wealthy people instead of remotely-wealthy people. As I've gotten more involved in local politics, I've discovered that local small business owners have a quite toxic influence on local politics. Who funds the campaigns opposing density? Often it's small business owners. In Seattle, the city was trying to create spaces where addicts could safely use need…
I'm struggling to see how local people influencing local politics is a bad thing. Would you prefer for remote corporations to control local politics?
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> 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 cli…
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I agree with all this and it may be the reason I leave stripe soon. I deal a lot in USD as an Australian company but stripe won’t allow us to charge in USD and settle into our USD bank accounts. But others will. Also the refund issue is crazy, no other provider we use does it.
IANAL, but couldn't you incorporate a wholly-owned US subsidiary using something like Stripe Atlas to handle USD payments and reduce your fees? By the way, my company has the opposite problem. Our Stripe account is registered in the UK and even though we process payments for Australian customers in AUD their local banks still charge them an extortionate "foreign transaction fee". This means that we had to open a sepa…
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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.
> it's important to be clear about what is actually being argued I agree, and I'm not arguing with you, at least not directly. I personally think of "rights" as a kind of useful fiction that gives a kind of psychological "leverage" in politics. I understand that a lot of people think that that term has some sort of concrete real-world referent, but I don't. I've never read anything intelligible on the matter, e.g. th…
Yes, of course. Rights are whatever we as a society decide they are. That's why I wrote, "should be considered a basic human right" rather than "is a basic human right."
> One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that.
The devil is very much in the details here, and reasonable people can disagree. IMHO bitcoin is dangerous. The anonymity and inability to roll back transactions is IMHO a bug, not a feature. It makes it too easy to produce irreversible bad outcomes through negligence or malice.
> But I think you mean more. I think you mean something like, constitutions should be amended to include EFT as a "basic human right", and that governments should provide the service too. Is that right?
More or less. I don't think it's so important what constitutions say. What matters more is what the societal consensus is. Money transfer should be a commodity. Its cost should be somewhere in the neighborhood of the marginal cost of production, which is one hell of a lot less than the 2.5% the credit card companies charge. And that cost should probably be born by society as a whole, just like with most other infrastructure.
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>(3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly. I understand they're not free, but I also understand Stripe does get a considerable portion back that they are no longer passing on? Couldn't this just have been applied to the problematic businesses then rather tha…
It varies based on the card type, country, and other things. We could expose all of that more directly but the trade-off there is obviously pricing complexity, which we'd like to avoid. In our analysis in making this change, we saw that this simply makes little difference for the vast majority of businesses. For example, if you're processing $100k/year and refund 5% of your payments (which would be on the high end of…
Stripe has made the right call here - though the silent and vast majority won't have anything to complain about so won't be on here posting.