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PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

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Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#31
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do at least $3-5k/month in transactions, a real merchant account from a bank/ISO/MSP. I pay $0.05 + 0.04% markup over interchange. Even after the monthly and gateway (Authorize.net) fees, that's around 2%, compared to Stripe's 2.9% or PayPal's 2.2% (I qualify for their merchant rate discount). Amex cards are the only ones I pay more for by not doing a flat rate. [By coding against Spreedly, it's possible to do…

I'm more interested in micropayments but this interchange stuff seems a bit complicated. How would a $2 payment work out with interchange included ? I mean, what fees would apply for a $2 credit card payment ?

[deleted]

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#32
Paypal will kill it, PAYPAL are the absolute worst company in the world and terrible to for any new businesses who endup having their money "held" for ridiculous amounts of time, and no customer support.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#34
Although I am sticking with Stripe, I hope that they leverage features like Venmo with PayPal's (rather large) user base - mobile payments are terrible as it stands.

It'll be interesting to see if large partners (GitHub, AirBnB, etc) stay onboard through the transition or if they are coerced by competitors.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#35

This has put me off of Braintree and on to Stripe, but not for the reasons you might suspect. You see, I still want to take PayPal payments from my customers who prefer it. But it doesn't seem like a good business to have all my eggs in one basket, and using a competing payment system gives me the ability to switch PayPal off if they try any shenanigans.

That's why I only code against Spreedly [1] instead of directly against any payment processor. One API instead of 53, switch processors just by changing a variable, and you can securely store customers' payment info without locking yourself into any processor's vaulting solution either. 1: https://spreedly.com/

do they support payouts?

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#37

Congrats to Stripe for all the new users!

I suspect this is very good timing on the part of Braintree. With Stripe now actively rolling out across more than North America and with other low-overhead payment services starting to appear as well, Braintree were effectively trapped in no-man's-land with their existing business model. For start-ups and small businesses, they were way too heavy for even basic stuff like signing up compared to the new competition. For larger, established businesses, direct merchant accounts and other banking facilities are probably worth the hassle given the better margins available. If I were them and had an out like this, I'd take it in a heartbeat, too.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#38
I'm always amused when I read the statements from newly acquired companies. They refuse to call it what it is, a purchase, and instead frame it as an alignment, a partnership, anything that allows them to distract from the fact that they are no longer autonomous.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#39

Congrats to Stripe for all the new users!

I heard that. As I've said before, people revere the PayPal mafia, but revile PayPal.

As it's been said by others here, this is certainly good for Stripe because more than a few Braintree customers will flock their way to avoid PayPal, but it also creates opportunities for other upstarts in this arena.

That being said, there is a certain amount of lock-in for these products, so while it's relatively easy for a business to transition their new users/payers from Braintree to Stripe/others, it's pretty painful to transition existing users/payers out of Braintree as all existing users would need to re-key their CC numbers and billing addresses.

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