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

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

#131

Post by pbiggar » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 1:52 AM UTC

jusben1369 wrote: post #83

jasonkester wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hours, I assume you mean months. It took me just shy of two months to get my merchant account set up a couple years back. In theory, you could do it in less time, but only if you already have your business licensed, registered and a business bank account set up in exactly the right way. But since that's part of the list of things you need to do to get a traditional payment provider set up that Stripe doesn't requi…

I think it's fair to say Stripe solved 4 problems. i) The time it takes to get a merchant account. It is only 24 - 72 hours unless something really goes wrong through other channels but with Stripe it's immediate. ii) The probability you'll get a merchant account (not a slam dunk for startups but 100% with Stripe?) Many developers hate dealing with financial institutions and then getting turned down is a bit humiliat…

I'm going to add a 5th: Being really simple. The first time I tried to figure out what a merchant account was, and a payment gateway, and all the associated fees, etc, was just exhausting.

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

#132

Post by pbiggar » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 1:55 AM UTC

angryasian wrote: post #107

dennisgorelik wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are different from most of users buying on Internet. Most prefer entering credit card directly.

i find that really hard to believe in this day and age of cyber criminal and so much activity in terms of stolen identities.

Credit card fraud doesn't really affect the end user, except in time lost disputing fraudulent charged. Mostly the cost of fraud is born by the retailer who receives no money even though they have already shipped the goods.

That said, in 13 years of credit card use, I have been defrauded 0 times.

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

#133

Post by Homunculiheaded » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 2:03 AM UTC

shinratdr wrote: post #113

pbreit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, the merchant still gets the sale and is happy (it's like boasting about getting 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond). All the merchant has to do is skip an email here and there (if they want). This is to say: you have not found a loophole; you are not a concern to the merchant; no one should be frightened by this tactic because of your story.

> Firstly, the merchant still gets the sale and is happy (it's like boasting about getting 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond). True, but they would have gotten more money had they held their ground. I was still going to buy the item, sometimes I abandon the cart accidentally because I got distracted. However if you shove a discount in my face assuming I'm about to walk, I'm going to use it even if I was just about to pa…

>It's still not necessarily a great idea depending on your business.

But that's the whole point of A/B testing, rather than argue of hours based on intuition and anecdote you can actually test these ideas. No need for debate here, just run experiment and look at the results.

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

#134

Post by mhartl » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 2:12 AM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #127

nemesisj wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why this is getting down voted. Stripe is close to my most hated company right now because they're not available in the UK :) It's really annoying.

"Hated", really?

I think he's being ironic. They're "hated" because they're so awesome, yet so very unavailable.

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

#135

Post by dennisgorelik » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 2:49 AM UTC

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #133

shinratdr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firstly, the merchant still gets the sale and is happy (it's like boasting about getting 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond). True, but they would have gotten more money had they held their ground. I was still going to buy the item, sometimes I abandon the cart accidentally because I got distracted. However if you shove a discount in my face assuming I'm about to walk, I'm going to use it even if I was just about to pa…

>It's still not necessarily a great idea depending on your business. But that's the whole point of A/B testing, rather than argue of hours based on intuition and anecdote you can actually test these ideas. No need for debate here, just run experiment and look at the results.

It's not so easy to run correct A/B test in that case. At a minimum you should measure long-term impact of emailing discount to users who abandoned shopping card. That means at least couple of months testing.

Note that debate is still needed in order to properly setup A/B test.

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

#136

Post by Homunculiheaded » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 3:32 AM UTC

dennisgorelik wrote: post #135

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's still not necessarily a great idea depending on your business. But that's the whole point of A/B testing, rather than argue of hours based on intuition and anecdote you can actually test these ideas. No need for debate here, just run experiment and look at the results.

It's not so easy to run correct A/B test in that case. At a minimum you should measure long-term impact of emailing discount to users who abandoned shopping card. That means at least couple of months testing. Note that debate is still needed in order to properly setup A/B test.

While I agree with what your saying in regards to not reasoning about the larger situation. Initial A/B testing should just be to get a sense of the magnitude of increase (if any) in conversion rates when you do the discount.

Only then can you reasonably discuss the issues presented. If your results say 'this is definitely a good idea for increasing purchases', then rather than do long term A/B tests it would be better to just monitor overall trends in potential abuse.

So there are really two separate issues: Do discount follow ups to abandoned carts create a large increase in purchases. This is easily answered with an A/B test

Are people likely to abuse this discount system? And how do we stop it if they do? This is hard to test with a simple A/B test and is much better answered just by monitoring the purchases and looking at the extreme cases. Also this is pretty easily solved by just adding limits to when the system grants discounts.

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

#137

Post by lsh123 » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 3:54 AM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #91

lsh123 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Absolutely, there are different levels. However, for all levels you have to do some work to achieve PCI compliance (and overall security of your system). There is no magic in this world :)

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

#138

Post by lsh123 » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 4:03 AM UTC

jusben1369 wrote: post #81

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…

It's worth noting that we're talking about "degrees" of PCI compliance vs "I'm on the hook or I'm not on the hook" Implementing Stripe so that the data never touches your servers still requires you to complete a SAQ-A. That's just a LOT easier than if you are handling the data and have to complete a different SAQ.

there is no magic in this world (even if stripe's marketing team wants you to believe that there is)

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

#139

Post by fastspring » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 4:09 AM 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?

Dan, FastSpring’s CEO, here. That’s a good question. With FastSpring, you don’t lose track of your site visitors because we support cross-domain tracking. When a purchase doesn’t complete, you can see the order issues and resolve them as appropriate. You can experiment with various designs and flows because FastSpring order pages are highly flexible and customizable in terms of how the order flow can look, placement of various elements on the order page, etc. and A/B testing is supported. FastSpring all-inclusive, turnkey functionality is mainly UI based. Little coding is needed, it’s all there – functionality you need to launch and functionality you need to grow and maximize the business and its revenue. FastSpring pricing of its all-inclusive service includes the higher processing costs inherent in international transactions, Amex transactions, and certain alternative payment methods.

Here are some advantages to FastSpring: FastSpring works with developers and companies located anywhere US companies are authorized to do business, handles global tax compliance and tax payment management including for VAT, enables end users to pay using their localized currency to avoid bank/exchange fees and a poor US/USD-centric user experience, provides an order page localized in 20+ languages, has PayPal integrated, lets you skip the PCI Assessment Questionnaire, offers fraud prevention, a built-in shopping cart, Google Analytics and marketing ad campaign tracking integration, an unlimited number of easy to setup post-order notifications, designs an order page to match the look and feel of the other pages of the developer’s website, offers merchandising features for cross and upselling to maximize the average order size and optimizer order conversion, built-in notifications, a future bill testing GUI, pre-bill notifications for annual subscriptions, reseller and affiliate management, user role mgmt. & change tracking, consulting for SEO/PPC/Affiliate marketing/Online marketing/order page optimization, one-time purchases in addition to recurring billing, among other advantages. Hope that's helpful with your comparison.

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

#140

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 4:30 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #73

tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why we should avoid talking about services that produce significant, easily measured uplifts for US companies just because those services aren't available in Europe. I absolutely understand the frustration being expressed and am not suggesting that these threads are the wrong place to express it. But the idea that we should "lay off the Stripe hype" sounds wrong. It's entirely possible that we're n…

To clarify, I don't agree with Silhouette that we should "lay off the hype". If anything, Stripe deserves it. I just hate it because it always reminds me that I can't even try it out.

Apparently I misunderstood what you meant earlier. Apologies if I misrepresented your view.