Not at all. There are other solutions around the world that bypass the payment gateways and credit card acquirers. In Holland they have iDEAL, in Thailand they have QR Codes, in Australia they have BPAY and in China they have WeChat Pay. There are tons more around the world. As a merchant, it can be very expensive integrating directly with all the different options, which is where these companies help - for a fee.
If you want to maximise sales and minimise abandoned baskets, you’d better make it easy for your customers to pay using the method they prefer!
Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
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Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#12Sure it would be possible with "enough" funding, almost by definition. If you can't, then the amount of funding clearly wasn't enough. I doubt you (or anyone btw) could get "enough" funding though. The amount of money you'd need just to get all their existing customers to switch would be monumental.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#13Nor do we needntobpay billions to healthcare managers orninsurance companies.
But we do, because capitalism both needs flexibility in separation of concerns and people need jobs and greed is its own fiefdom genersting maxhine.
Think of it like evolution and social diversity. Studies in squirrels have shown that larger social groups create a need for greater phenotypical visual diversity, if only for identificTion
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#14Put your efforts where your mouth is and go build your own "real competition" if you think its that easy.
Q: does anyone think it possible to rival them in a decade with enough funding?
> go build your own "real competition" if you think its that easy.
Another dismissive comment. What inspires these? The Q proposes a significant timetable and suggests adequate funding. I'd agree it's open ended but it sounds like the OP is inviting education on the topic.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#15This was something that was supposed to be solved by the original internet they just never got around to it. You are not wrong though... the issue as many people pointed out is that you are focusing on the transactions. The problem these companies solve isn't just the transaction network - their values is primarily how they deal with fraud, governance, currency conversions, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#16Not at all. There are other solutions around the world that bypass the payment gateways and credit card acquirers. In Holland they have iDEAL, in Thailand they have QR Codes, in Australia they have BPAY and in China they have WeChat Pay. There are tons more around the world. As a merchant, it can be very expensive integrating directly with all the different options, which is where these companies help - for a fee. If…
Do those services also deal with fraud, chargebacks, etc., or are they basically digital cash equivalents?
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#17This was something that was supposed to be solved by the original internet they just never got around to it. You are not wrong though... the issue as many people pointed out is that you are focusing on the transactions. The problem these companies solve isn't just the transaction network - their values is primarily how they deal with fraud, governance, currency conversions, etc.
Who is "they" in that sentence?
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#18> In total these companies have profit in double digit billions
If you think about it.
Stripe, Block, PayPal only exist because of credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, Discover) and issuing banks (JPM, WF, BoA, foreign banks). Those last two groups of entities have such terrible integrations/interfaces and fail to improve due to their oligopoly on the entire process of facilitating buyer and seller payment processing.
Stripe, Block, PayPal are just mere parasites living off of other parasites (the 3-7% transaction/network/issuing bank fees).
A “rival” is a complete dissolution of these parasitic entities. Cash used to be a good alternative, but comes with its own set of setbacks that do not meet our modern era (ie, can’t pay for items with cash in e-commerce, pains of handling high amounts of cash IRL)
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#19Stripe, Block, and PayPal each solved a massive pain point. PayPal provided a way to pay people and vendors without giving away your credit card number. Square made it easy to accept payment in person on a phone, without an extensive upfront underwriting experience and without expensive fixed monthly fees. Stripe did the same as Square, but for accepting online payments. Fraud and Risk come in many forms, and these p…
> Fraud and Risk come in many forms, and these providers, even with their UX innovations, sit on top of those same rails to reduce fraud. Without those rails, buyers can’t trust sellers and sellers can’t trust buyers.
In my opinion, you need to find a way to solve that problem before you can eliminate the fees being captured by these providers.
And failing the elimination of those issues there will always be some fees. New vendors can pop in and push the fee structure down if they can run a more efficient operation.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#20You've lumped together companies that do very different things. I would just google "payment card network" and you can spend days going down rabbit holes to understand how complex the system is. And yes it is all totally necessary: https://www.spreedly.com/blog/card-processing-network "Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx also form the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) alongside Japan’s JCB International. The PCI…
> And yes it is all totally necessary
Highlighting because it's important. We recently got a totally free and open payments system, probably hundreds of them in fact, and they're a disaster. All the inequity and risk that any money system inherently possesses, with zero protections for anyone involved and zero recourse if you're robbed blind, unless of course you're wealthy in which case the people actually in charge who insist they aren't in charge will write a whole bunch more code to give you you're money back even though that's not how this works for anyone else. And that's not even getting into the fact that every seven transactions used as much electricity as Visa uses per minute to handle hundreds of thousands.