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Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

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Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#21

Post by edwinwee »

globile wrote: post #2

It is pretty clear by now Stripe has big guns pointed at enterprise customers. What others like Checkout.com, Adyen thought was a relatively safe moat, has now clearly disappeared. However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs. I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it…

Edwin from Stripe here. Postmates started using Stripe as an SME, when they were probably smaller than your company. We’ve been scaling alongside them for the past decade, and the auth optimization features mentioned in the post weren’t built for them—they’re built for and used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, Radar’s ML was designed to become better as the network grows—the more card transactions it sees, the more effective it becomes (imagine the fraud data we learn from every Postmates transaction can be applied to your transactions too!). This is one of the principles of Stripe—and it’s our goal to help scale your company’s growth, just like Postmate’s.

That said, could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can take another look at the issues you mentioned? (For example, we honor rates for their negotiated term.)

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#22

Post by toomuchtodo »

staunch wrote: post #7

Alternate headline: Stripe helps Postmates screw their customers out of $70 million > "By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly." This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires or they replace it to get rid of their subscription accounts.…

Thanks for bringing this issue up. I've added the concern to my list of items to cover with policymakers I interact with. This behavior should be better regulated by financial regulation and governed by the CFPB, similar to what currently applies to direct debits [1].

User consent should absolutely be required for such changes to financial obligations by way of charge subscriptions.

[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/you-have-prote...

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#23

Post by gingerlime »

globile wrote: post #2

It is pretty clear by now Stripe has big guns pointed at enterprise customers. What others like Checkout.com, Adyen thought was a relatively safe moat, has now clearly disappeared. However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs. I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it…

Yes I feel roughly the same. Our experience as an EU stripe merchant with charging US cards is pretty great though. 97%+ acceptance if I recall... Brazil however is a very sore point. We hope to localize to Spanish and reach Latam though so we’re a bit worried. We heard it’s better than Brazil.

We’re still a tiny B2C though, so we definitely feel the complicated marriage side of things. Not to mention PayPal. The missing elephant in the room.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#24

Post by noirbot »

snug wrote: post #13
mc10 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires Is this really shady? I’d personally find this behavior super convenient.

Seems a bit shady if say I use a refillable gift card for certain services that are hard to cancel

That seems like it's not this situation though? It's not like they're going to refill the gift card for you or somehow guess the new card number.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#25

Post by mikikian »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #17

How much better is the cost per payment for one of Stripe's big customers? It's 2.9% + $0.30 for most, but if a company is doing, like Postmates are, millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars in sales volume, what sort of 'preferred' rates do they receive from Stripe?

These rates will posted a while back. YMMV.

$0 – 100,000 / month 2.9% + 30¢

$100,001 – 500,000 / month 2.7% + 30¢

$500,001 – 1,000,000 / month 2.4% + 30¢

$1,000,001 – 5,000,000 / month 2.2% + 30¢

$5,000,001+ / month 1.9% + 30¢

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#26

Post by nrmitchi »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #11
staunch wrote: post #7

Alternate headline: Stripe helps Postmates screw their customers out of $70 million > "By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly." This is the shady practice of charging people's new credit card when their old one expires or they replace it to get rid of their subscription accounts.…

In one way, this is exactly the comment I came here to read. The article made my eyes glaze over it was so press-release-y and so I wanted to know what the actual plain language detail is. You delivered that, thank you. However, in the specific case of Postmates, have they actually used this feature to screw people over? I get what you are saying in the case of a subscription like Netflix. But with Postmates, the use…

In the specific case of Postmates listed in the linked article,

> By intelligently updating the credentials on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, CAU optimizes authorization rates to keep subscription payments recurring seamlessly.

So either Stripe is referring to a feature that Postmates didn't directly use (unlikely), or they are referring to Postmates Unlimited subscriptions, which is $10/month (and not an in-the-moment decision)

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#28

Post by nrmitchi »

staunch wrote: post #20
sinsterizme wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just looking to complain here. It's super convenient and I would argue less surprising that an updated credit-card retains the subscriptions that were on my expired card. It's not going to follow you if you completely replace the credit-card https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards

Wrong. I'm speaking from the personal experience of knowing poor people who have been hurt by this practice. There's no reason this couldn't have been implemented by asking customers for consent. Consent isn't asked because it's not likely to be granted in many cases and they fucking know it.

Exactly. If Postmates (or Stripe, they can pass this logic through if they really wanted to) already knows (or thinks it knows) your new card details, it could just as easily be an in-app pop-up or push notification of "We've detected that your card you use on Postmates has been replaced. Would you like to update your account to the card ending in XXXX?"

Extremely little use friction, it's a single button press, but it actually informs the user or what is happening.

It would be really interesting to me to see the stats on how many users who have had their cards automatically updated actually make a purchase afterwards, and how many are zombies.

Re: Postmates added $70M in revenue and saved $3M in network fees with Stripe

#29

Post by DizzyDoo »

mikikian wrote: post #25
DizzyDoo wrote: post #17

How much better is the cost per payment for one of Stripe's big customers? It's 2.9% + $0.30 for most, but if a company is doing, like Postmates are, millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars in sales volume, what sort of 'preferred' rates do they receive from Stripe?

These rates will posted a while back. YMMV. $0 – 100,000 / month 2.9% + 30¢ $100,001 – 500,000 / month 2.7% + 30¢ $500,001 – 1,000,000 / month 2.4% + 30¢ $1,000,001 – 5,000,000 / month 2.2% + 30¢ $5,000,001+ / month 1.9% + 30¢

Thanks for looking that up for me! It was something I had been thinking about.
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