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Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

gc-taylor.com

101–110 of 120 posts

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#102

Why on earth Europe doesn't have something like Stripe or WePay ?? This is such an amazing opportunity, and I can see lots of people who would invest in it.

Dealing with all of the banks, currency, and laws sounds like an absolute mess. Each country does business differently.

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#103

The post is spot on. My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API ( shu…

> maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs?

But the problem is theirs. Their site says it all:

"No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money."

Therefore, if you're having an issue with your checkout form and their API, it very much is their problem. You're not able to process payments, so you're not able to get paid. Because you're not getting paid, they're not getting paid.

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#104

The post is spot on. My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API ( shu…

> maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs? But the problem is theirs. Their site says it all: "No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money." Therefore, if you're having an issue with your checkout form and their API, it very much is their problem. You're not able to process payments, so you're not able to get paid. Because…

That's a huge stretch. It would be like claiming that an engineer at Google should email me whenever my website goes down and help me fix it because, if my website is down, then it's one less website in their index, and they need sites in their index in order to sell advertising.

To make sure that I'm clear: the problem was entirely unrelated to Stripe; it had to do with a different component of my site.

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#105

The post is spot on. My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API ( shu…

> maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs? But the problem is theirs. Their site says it all: "No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money." Therefore, if you're having an issue with your checkout form and their API, it very much is their problem. You're not able to process payments, so you're not able to get paid. Because…

I don't even think the "Why?" of good support matters, from our (the user's) concern, as long as the support is there and fast.

Technically, PayPal depends on people sending payments through them to draw profit, as well, but that didn't get us good support.

The big takeaway from the top of this thread is: Stripe's support was fast, even when it wasn't necessarily their service that was causing the issue. Why they came to the rescue fast doesn't really matter.

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#106
You may want to also consider SaaSy.com: - All-inclusive – hardly any development work needed - More functionality - GUI-based for the most part - Global tax/VAT management - Works with vendors in most any country - 10 currencies - 20 languages - Best customer service experience of your life

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#107
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't integrated Stripe, but I have integrated WePay, PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments into various applications. WePay's API is very well designed and easy to understand. The documentation is blissfully short and effective. When I had technical questions, a post to their email list got me a detailed response within hours (and usually within minutes). Honestly it's the best developer support experienc…

If you are the kind of person who cares about whether the validation closes the IPN retry so you can come up with a reasonable strategy for handling your database transaction policy (which is a good thing: people should care this much about everything they do), then Stripe's documented policy should be a non-starter, as it seems to indicate there is not going to be any retry at all if the request in any way hits your…

Hey Saurik, Just wanted to say that we're aware of the (significant) flaws in the webhook APIs. We're in the process of redesigning them now, so thanks for the feedback on what is important to you.

(Also, just FYI, you can see logs of all the webhooks in your Stripe account, including the response body and response status code, and they can be retried with a button click -- a manual process, yes, but it is at least possible)

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#108

You may want to also consider SaaSy.com: - All-inclusive – hardly any development work needed - More functionality - GUI-based for the most part - Global tax/VAT management - Works with vendors in most any country - 10 currencies - 20 languages - Best customer service experience of your life

To be perfectly honest, this is pretty far from the discussion. SaaSy looks expensive, and their website isn't even clear enough to see if they offer the redirect-less single payment checkout.

I'm assuming this is just a shameless plug? Nothing wrong with that, but it looks like you don't even have the feature set the original article is discussing.

Edit: Oh, I see what's going on: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fastspring

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#109
post #89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your PayPal IPN rant at all (I designed IPN; it's not perfect but it works pretty well). PayPal POSTs payment details to you. You capture those details, post them back to PayPal as-is and PayPal tells you if they are valid or not. Pretty simple. Of course there is a unique identifier: the txn_id. And because the validation step is a simple hash that doesn't hit the DB, it's very performant.

The rant was about the retry algorithm, which (from reasonable interpretations of the documentation) seems to "clear" (for lack of a better term) the IPN during a successful "response" (the term used in the PDF), but where a "response" seems to be defined as the verification step, not the HTTP request returning a successful status code. If this were the case (and it seems from other responses to the rant that it is n…

I still don't totally understand the issue. If your commit fails you can return a "500 error" which will cause the IPN to retry.

I can see how the validation step might be confusingly described. For what it's worth, the validation step merely compares a hash of the variables to confirm the authenticity of the IPN. It doesn't touch the DB at all.

Re: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

#110
I'm eager to try stripe myself but it wasn't right for our business due to the transaction costs. We do anywhere from a quarter to half million per month in transaction fees and it's amazing how those fractions of a percent and one penny turn into thousands of dollars! We looked at losing about $20k per month so it didn't make sense.

But I have a generic payment processor API that I wrote and I plan to add support for stripe into that for personal projects.

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