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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

#51

Post by ianstallings »

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.

But using a service like authorize.net usually means using their PCI-compliant storage in turn with their e-commerce service. How it works is basically the data does not have to pass through your servers exactly like stripe works. They store the data in their servers and you use a key to pass that data to the e-commerce mechanism, never seeing the actual data yourself.

If you're interested the service is called the Customer Information Manager. You can use it to store any secure data that you'd rather not be responsible for. I've used it to great success.

My main reason for my love affair with authorize.net? Recurring billing. They nailed it.

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

#52

Post by patio11 »

brador wrote: post #46
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oopsie. Thanks for the correction.

Patrick, just noticed your Adwords spend went from $1000's to $0 suddenly. Looks like a disaster. What happened? Is Adwords no longer viable?

I got married. Lots of balls to juggle. "Send credit card statements to VA for entry into the bookkeeping software which automatically populates a few stats on the BCC website" wasn't very high on the list. My actual spend is probably as high as ever, but "Log into AdWords to check" also hasn't been high on the list.

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

#53

Post by jacobn »

> "All three of these tests were null results. (i.e. No significant difference in aggregate purchases between either of the two options" (for goog&payp vs stripe, and several other combos)

This is a very interesting result. I would have thought that additional payment options would boost sales on the margin i.e. increase conversion by a couple of percent (not percentage points ;) for e.g. international customers, or people who already have accounts with GG/PP.

Patrick: Any chance you could elaborate a little more here? Would be very interesting to see some more detailed stats on this aspect.

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

#54

Post by aresant »

At ConversionVoodoo we've found that the gains pulled out of cart-work are staggering vs. other areas in your funnel - 50%+ improvements to be had even on high volume / "well optimized" projects (10k+ sales/mo).

Three easy places to start:

a) Simplify the UI - Make it as simple as possible for people to enter their payment details - large fonts, cross-browser tested, minimal pages, optimized for the lowest screen resolution of your average user on up.

b) Reiterate TRUST messaging - testimonials or buying popular symbols (Verign /McAfee / etc) and even dialing in the PLACEMENT of those logos is high-value eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen...

e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, calling dropped carts, or hitting a pop-up of live help or similar is easy money.

Add to this all the usual - proper messaging on buttons, lightning fast response times, mobile optimized version too, etc and you instantly gain a massive advantage over your competitors.

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

#55

Post by Reebz »

sulife wrote: post #26
jdelsman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about figuring it out, the key thing here is transfer of risk. Its certainly won't be "bs" if you get a fine due to a breech.

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

#56

Post by corkill »

dmix wrote: post #13
StavrosK wrote: post #10

God I hate posts about Stripe with a passion. It's like saying "You've had this pain in your back for the last five years? Well, I've got this miracle pill here that will not only make it go away, but it will also taste great . Oh, you're not in the US? Too bad then." Stop reminding me I can't use Stripe all the time.

Stripe is beta testing internationally. I got an account in Canada about 2 weeks ago. http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-e...

Great to hear, I'm just praying they remove the need for a social security number in the US.

One of the main reasons we chose the US to incorporate in was for access to business tools like this. But with neither founder having a SS number we can't use the service.

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

#57

Post by vstm »

TomGullen wrote: post #39
ceejayoz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Only if you do it wrong. From the Stripe docs: "The only thing to note is how input fields…

Can't they deny all requests from non HTTPS pages then?

No, I think there is no way to detect if the HTTP-request to the server which makes the API call is made via HTTPS or not. Except if their libraries detect that on your side and block the API call there, but of course that can be easily circumvented. They can only enforce that HTTPS requests are made to their API.

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

#59

Post by pc »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #21

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 h…

Yeah, we just messed this up. I'm very sorry. I'm literally walking to a meeting with a user, but I'll follow up and edit this comment with details and what we're doing to prevent it within the next three hours.

[Update:] So, the background here is that 1099 reporting rules changed last year. A lot of companies—including some of our partners—didn't yet have their infrastructure in place to properly handle them. A lot has been written about the change in the law (search "2011 1099 confusion" for a small sample), and there's been a fair amount of ambiguity and confusion overall (Citibank issued 1099s for frequent flyer miles; whether this was necessary isn't yet clear). Due to this confusion, the IRS actually backed off plans to require the reconciliation of Form 1099K in tax returns filed for 2011.

In Stripe's case, one of our banking partners responsible for the filings was unable to meet the original filing date for all 1099s. While they filed a proper extension with the IRS, this meant that receipt of your 1099 was delayed.

As you point out, we should have done a much better job communicating this at each step -- and, obviously, receiving tax forms in mid-April is not an acceptable outcome regardless. We are working on controlling the process much more closely ourselves next year so that this does not happen again.

But the bottom line is: sorry. We built Stripe to make this kind of hassle go away, and we're doing everything we can to make sure that this was a one-off blip.

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