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

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

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

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

#41

Post by thomasfortes »

gingerlime wrote: post #23
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 mis…

Brazilian dev with some experience in developing systems used across LatAm.

Honestly, it is a mess...

There are specific payment methods that are common in a single country where people prefer to use that instead of credit cards, as a result sometimes we have to integrate a bunch of different payment processors, a couple of them with non-existent or terrible documentation which result in a ton of emails and calls to clarify stuff.

Stripe is in Beta in Brazil for a while but I never developed something with it for the local market, there is a countrywide processor here that have great documentation and support everything that Brazilian customers are used to and the fees are in the same ballpark, so there's no need to use it.

> We heard it’s better than Brazil.

Which is funny for me, integrating payment processors in Brazil isn't a big deal and I had a lot of trouble with a few LatAm processors, but if I had to guess the reason I would say that a lot of old cards and cards for people with low income used to be national only, they couldn't pay anything in other currencies, nowadays the card situation is a bit better and most issued cards can purchase international goods but since stripe apparently is coming to Brazil, if you could process your payments through it it should work flawlessly.

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

#42

Post by LordAtlas »

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.…

Wait, this kind of thing is legal in USA?

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

#43

Post by edwinwee »

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.

If a cardholder cancels their account and gets a new one, that card number won’t be shared and updated with Stripe’s Card Account Updater. We work directly with each card issuer to update the number if the physical card is lost, stolen, or got renewed. The most common use case I’ve seen: a customer losing their wallet and then getting a replacement card. But when checking out on a site where they saved their card, they don’t have to re-enter their new number. This is why we call it Card Account Updater.

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

#44

Post by londons_explore »

edwinwee wrote: post #37
londons_explore wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is stripe doing fraud detection, when someone like Visa or MasterCard would have far more data and be able to offer much better fraud detection?

The card issuers do their individual basic fraud detection (e.g. security code) but we built our own on top after users asked for something more advanced. Imagine Stripe seeing data across all the card networks, compound that with customer info (like email or IP, which card networks don’t always collect) across all businesses on Stripe, then that’s fed into our ML network that’s constantly tuned by Stripe engineers.…

True, but the big networks process far more transactions than stripe does, have access to more data (where else has this card been used lately, has the bill been paid, has this customer used the card in a shop abroad, etc), and seem in a better position overall to combat fraud.

The network also has access to the account holders phone number so can actually call to validate risky transactions.

Lower fraud rates would also make issuing banks more likely to choose visa over MasterCard, so be a competitive advantage.

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

#45

Post by somethingwitty1 »

HaloZero wrote: post #12
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.…

Isn't replacing a card usually triggered b/c your card was lost or stolen? As a consumer it seems that I would want to keep my subscriptions ongoing if that happens vs having to type in my cards in all my services again. I've rarely heard of people replacing a card b/c they want to cancel all their subscriptions.

Cards expire. I don't have data on which is the most common, but based on my personal experience, the majority of my replacement cards are from expiration, not from being lost or stolen.

When my cards are lost/stolen, they provide a whole new card number. To my knowledge, they are not eligible for these auto-update programs.

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

#46

Post by staunch »

rsstack wrote: post #39
jawns wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you describe it, switching to a new credit card is a slightly easier way to get rid of a recurring charge than going through the proper channels and calling to cancel a subscription, and people who do so are just being lazy. But in reality, many companies make it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription, even when the customer has the right to do so. I have experienced cases where the only way to cancel is…

It was a loophole that happened to work but that's not one of the design objectives of the credit card system. It isn't Postmates', or Stripe's, or Visa's fault that some companies refuse to let you cancel (ahm... Shipt...). They don't need to make the card replacement process _worst_ for everyone just because of those few bad companies, when they have a different process for dealing with non-cancelling subscriptions…

The practice of charging a replacement card is relatively new and not how credit cards worked for decades.

Why wasn't customer consent part of the process? Because that would lead to a huge number of denials and account cancellations for unwanted services.

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

#47

Post by mc10 »

staunch wrote: post #16
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.

Imagine being a poor person that gets a replacement credit card expecting to ditch your subscriptions, to get your finances in order, and then getting billed anyway on your new card.

I think replacement cards are explicitly not included based on some Stripe responses in this thread. My quote of the parent comment intentionally ends at “old one expires”.

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

#48

Post by viklove »

LordAtlas wrote: post #42
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.…

Wait, this kind of thing is legal in USA?

Where is it illegal? Can you point me to the law that makes it so? Curious to see the wording of how they identify and enforce something like that.

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

#49

Post by staunch »

edwinwee wrote: post #43
staunch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a cardholder cancels their account and gets a new one, that card number won’t be shared and updated with Stripe’s Card Account Updater. We work directly with each card issuer to update the number if the physical card is lost, stolen, or got renewed. The most common use case I’ve seen: a customer losing their wallet and then getting a replacement card. But when checking out on a site where they saved their card, th…

Yeah, in other words, Stripe engages in exactly the unethical behavior I described above.

Why does Stripe not insist on requiring customer consent for this feature created supposedly for their convenience?

And we all know why: because a lot of customers would not consent to the thing Stripe does supposedly for their benefit.

And then you couldn't write articles and sell Stripe as a solution to extracting money from people who, in many cases, don't actually want to be customers.

You can blame people for not handling their finances better or claim that "everyone else is doing it" too, just like banks do with overdraft fees, but that doesn't make it less evil.

Rationalize it however you want. You're hurting poor people.

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

#50

Post by tonystubblebine »

nrmitchi wrote: post #26
tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Got it. Thanks.
Post reply on HN