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Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

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Re: Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

#21

Post by jeremymcanally »

Stripe the service is fantastic. I just hope they can get the financial side together soon. They sent me a 1099 on April 14 this year (you know, one day before taxes are due). Fortunately I hadn't filed yet (I was literally typing everything in TurboTax as the postman came). Not only was that usually illegal (at least for traditional 1099's; I don't know if the same rules apply to 1099-K's...haven't looked), it was highly annoying as it was also the second one they sent me (each with a different amount). Turns out they'd switched payment processors or something at one point and didn't bother to tell their customers to expect two 1099's.

Still using it. Great product. But I had to file an extension and crap to get it all sorted out, which was highly annoying.

Re: Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

#25

Post by jdelsman »

sulife wrote: post #5

Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.

It might be trivial to charge, but storing credit card details and remaining PCI compliant is a nightmare for businesses, especially at scale. Trust me -- getting audited and fined because you're not PCI complaint is much more expensive than giving the burden to another company like Stripe. Plus, Stripe is great because they don't hold your customers' data hostage.

Re: Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

#26

Post by sulife »

jdelsman wrote: post #25
sulife wrote: post #5

Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.

It might be trivial to charge, but storing credit card details and remaining PCI compliant is a nightmare for businesses, especially at scale. Trust me -- getting audited and fined because you're not PCI complaint is much more expensive than giving the burden to another company like Stripe. Plus, Stripe is great because they don't hold your customers' data hostage.

If 1% of your revenue is worth not spending a few hours to figure out BS PCI stuff I suggest you rethink your priorities or you're doing really low volume where 1% is like $5.

Re: Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

#27

Post by sulife »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #17
sulife wrote: post #5

Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.

That's certainly not been my experience with setting up online billing through authorize.net (or braintree for that matter). Integration is easy enough, it's the screwing around with getting a merchant account that's a pita. Plus, if you're a startup, you don't really know how much you're going to be selling (or not selling). It's a good idea to keep associated costs variable until you have some better benchmarks. St…

This is how it goes... you call Chase Paymentech and sign an app and 24 hours later you have an account. WOW, tough!

Re: Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

#30

Post by MBCook »

TomGullen wrote: post #7

> This means that their credit card details never hit your server. One thing I've been seeing recently is that some implementations using Stripe DO have the CC details hitting their server. The most common case being when Javascript is disabled the form posts to the website because the developer didn't design with graceful degradation, a dangerous mistake when mixed with credit card numbers. It doesn't appear to be a…

I worked on something with credit card processing a few years ago. As I remember, it doesn't really matter if the details hit your server, but the point is you absolutely can not save them.

No putting them in a DB, no putting the in a log file (not even the last four or something like that), nothing. So if your form takes the numbers in, you make an API call, and then you blank them in memory you were OK.

If you put them in the user's session, you were in trouble.

It's all insanely complicated, and the only good solution is "don't do it." There's a good reason people use things like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net's CIM (where they store it and certify that they are PCI compliant).

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