Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by MBCook » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 7:41 PM UTC

lsh123 wrote: post #77

MBCook wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please read stripe's TOS - your application is REQUIRED to be PCI compliant.

I think I know why I got this wrong. There are multiple levels of PCI compliance, right? I think we used services that allowed us to not have to be compliant with data at rest (since we didn't store it), but only the data in transit (or whatever the equivalent term is).

This is by no means my area of expertise (as I have accidentally proven).

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

#92

Post by sulife » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 7:58 PM UTC

pclark wrote: post #89

sulife wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being honest. Would you prefer: Stripe is an amazing service and their founders are amazing people. I wish I could blow them, but they probably wouldn't even let me b/c the VCs are already all over that. On the other hand, for people who enjoy saving money, becoming PCI compliant and saving 1% + trans fees is another alternative and there are numerous tutorials available to help anyone do that within a few…

No need to be an ass. Also, it's business 101 to focus on your core and outsource the rest: so yes, it absolutely is worth using stripe rather than building payment architecture yourself. You are probably the only person on Hacker News that thinks building all this yourself makes sense.

It's business 100 to not waste money. If 1% is not a lot to save you have a hobby, not a business. I do see you enjoy using every service imaginable. I imagine you are building your dumb idea on top of Amazon SES or sendgrid. And you even used some other dumbass start up to make an email submit form for new startups. You're a pro.

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

#93

Post by ceslami » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:06 PM UTC

sulife wrote: post #27

dave_sullivan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The light gray color of your comments should give you a hint as to how welcome they are in this community.

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

#94

Post by pg_bot » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:16 PM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #18

bazookaBen wrote: post #2

have to admit, that one of the reasons patio11 got Patrick (cofounder of Stripe) to help with customer support is because he's *the patio11 but great customer service is still great, no matter what.

How do you know this for a fact?

(More anecdotal evidence) Patrick Collison also helped me out when I was implementing Stripe on my site, and I am just a regular joe.

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

#95

Post by metadata » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:31 PM UTC

stevoski wrote: post #28

I currently use FastSpring to handle purchases of my software. What's the advantage to using Stripe instead of FastSpring?

Stripe allows you to charge customer on your site instead of redirecting her to other domain to fill out the purchase form. So, you lose track of your website visitor in a very important moment. If purchase never occurs, you have no idea why. On the other hand, with Stripe you have full control of complete purchasing experience, can experiment with various designs and flows - and measure everything. That enables huge gains with rigorous A/B testing, as Patrick explained.

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

#96

Post by dennisgorelik » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:34 PM UTC

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…

Do payment processors even have to send you 1099?

If I'm not mistaken, Google Checkout and PayPal did not send me 1099 - I just had to report all the revenue received from them myself.

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

#97

Post by sulife » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:39 PM UTC

ceslami wrote: post #93

sulife wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The light gray color of your comments should give you a hint as to how welcome they are in this community.

This community can't handle the truth. Instead it idolizes dumbass ideas.

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

#98

Post by spitfire » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:59 PM UTC

zevyoura wrote: post #82

sulife wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's about 5 million tutorials online how to do everything properly. < 1 day work for 1% of sales... HMMMMMMMMM. tough decision, not.

This kind of tone is generally looked down on here at HN. I think there's an argument to be made on your side, but you're doing an exceptionally poor job at making it in a civil and friendly way. I'm genuinely interested in the other side of the story, but you have to have the discussion in good faith.

There is a good argument to be made on his side. But it's a business decision on what adds the most value for people.

For most people, they aren't (and don't want to be) experts in payment processing. Improving their product moves the needle by more than 1% for the same (or less) effort than spending time on payment processing.

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

#99

Post by akldfgj » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:59 PM UTC

aresant wrote: post #54

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 res…

Wow, I am not a target customer for modern e-commerce. I would never return to a store that had behaviors like this:

> e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order,

Training users to haggle at checkout and not trust the list prices

> calling dropped carts.

harassing people offline after they leave your store?

> or hitting a pop-up of live help

Does anyone believe in live help? All I ever see it do it block content I am trying to read, providing the equivalent of menu-driven CLI (the scripts agents follow) when I already have a powerful GUI in front of me.

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

#100

Post by akldfgj » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 9:01 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #52

brador wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VA?