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Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

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11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#11
post #9

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.

That's great if you don't plan to sell anything.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#12
post #8

You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening. It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic. Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.

Doesn't Bitcoin have transaction fees ?

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#13
post #9

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.

Good thing crypto exchanges don't charge fees.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#14
post #9

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.

That's not doable in practise.

- You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular.

- Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again.

There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#15
post #9

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.

That's not doable in practise. - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular. - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again. There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

> Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee.

Not sure what exchange you're using, but 0.1% on market trades is pretty common. That's very low compared to most fees.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#16
post #4

How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way. In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant. You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't…

This cannot be understated enough. Accepting cryptocurrency may hit you with KYC requirements in your region, PayPal is frankly worse than Stripe, opening a merchant bank account just to process might not be worth it, and oh PCI-DSS audits will just kill your idea off the ground of processing credit card payments, not to mention the hassle of actually handling the fallout of card data leak.

If you're not in the US and will only process domestic transactions are are willing to skip acceptance of credit cards, you would want to look if your environment allows a much more simpler acceptance system (for example in Canada, parts of Europe and India a merchant bank account is relatively frictionless compared to American ones). Otherwise, read on.

Unless you're a very big company with dedicated accountants and backend logistics and in the fees collected by Stripe will be bigger than bringing it inhouse, it'll be much, much more expensive to be honest. Stripe probably is the least worst option right now since that you don't need to have a merchant bank account for example, which can be an headache.

However, if you want to minimise data collection at any cost, then probably only accept cash and cryptocurrencies (that is, if you run a node and not outsource it a la Stripe)?

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not doable in practise. - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular. - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again. There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.

> Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Not sure what exchange you're using, but 0.1% on market trades is pretty common. That's very low compared to most fees.

You are misunderstanding the op.

He wants a payment processor for merchants, eg. bitpay.

1% transaction fee

Exchanges then have a:

- 0,1 % withdrawal fee

- Unknown/hidden? currency conversion fee. I would think there is a fee here, but i didn't find it documented.

Additionally, exchanges like Binance are banned in many places ( because of tether fraud). Coinbase would be one of the only exchanges to consider as a business in eg. The US.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#18
post #5

Yes, make your customers mail you a check or cash /s

In the UK if you really didn’t want to use a processor you could ask people to bank transfer you cash (free for both parties with Faster Payments) or send cheques, although most banks are phasing them out. There are definitely web stores which have this as an option and I’ve seen it in NZ too. The downside is manual labour and a transfer speed of O(minutes).

I used to help run a summer camp in Europe and we always took payment via direct transfer. None of us had the experience to write an e-commerce solution and we didn’t have the budget to buy one. Nowadays I guess we could use Stripe, but it’s still simpler to give people account details to pay into and to tell us when they sent it. We don’t have the numbers to justify anything complex either. Only recently we started accepting donations via PayPal and even then only because it’s very easy to generate the code for the button.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#19
If all your customers are local to your own country then yes you can engage a merchant e-commerce solution usually provided by a local major bank.

These were popular before Stripe arose.

You can save fees BUT the application process is often much more manual and long. Also don’t expect add-ons like having a good API or strong reporting or analytics.

Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

#20
post #4

How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way. In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant. You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't…

I think this raises really great points - but I think there is one additional major question too which is "what scale are you dealing at?".

If you are handling billions of dollars in sales, then yes, rolling your own payment infrastructure will probably be worthwhile, but at that scale you will also be getting a very different commercial offer from the payment gateways anyway.

If you 'only' have a million dollars in sales, then there isn't going to be a payback here (but there may be a cheaper payment gateway than Stripe).

The fees to Visa and MasterCard can't be avoided - even Amazon is having a public commercial spat Visa over fees.

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