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PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

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Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#151
post #149

We were in the middle of migrating from PayPal to Braintree for a marketplace solution. Anyone have documentation or comments on Stripe vs. Balancedpayments.com vs. Braintree for marketplaces?

(I work at Stripe)

We have two products built for marketplaces, including Stripe Connect (https://stripe.com/connect) and Stripe Payouts (https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe), which differ depending on what type of marketplace you're building. Docs for Connect are here (https://stripe.com/docs/connect) and docs for Payouts are here (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers). Feel free to email me at cristina@stripe.com if you're not sure which would be the best fit for you.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#152
post #15

We were just about to add payments to our site, and Braintree was high on the list to checkout. Any other suggestions in addition to Stripe? -edit- This seems like a good list: http://gatewayindex.spreedly.com

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 work at Stripe)

We've encountered a lot of customers that are paying much more than they should be for a merchant account and gateway setup. Stripe's fees start at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, we don't have any hidden fees, and we offer volume discounts for businesses on track to do $1MM/year or more. Separately, PayPal has many add-on fees ($30 per month if you want to design and host your own checkout pages, 1% cross-border surcharge, 3.5% transaction fee when your customers pay with American Express, etc.) which often make it more expensive than Stripe.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#153
post #55

Boy, everyone is so negative about the purchase on here! Braintree's customer base is far too large at this point for PayPal to just shut it down ; that would be terrible PR because Braintree is critical to many businesses at this point. It's also not that easy to just go rip out one processor for another on a huge legacy code base. PayPal would be making things worse for themselves if they did that and this purchase…

They've bought payment providers in the past. The last big one was Verisign Payments and they've kept that running as a separate product since 2005! https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/gene...

I also doubt they'll shut down Braintree or roll it into the main product.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a company working as a purely Internet bank of sorts and I'll show you a company with pissed off customers. Truth is, this business is very hard. For every time Paypal misidentifies a target and blocks their payments, they correctly identify scammers many more times. We tend to think "is it that hard to tell a scammer from blah legit site ?". The answer is yes because guess what scammers are thinking everyday…

I don't think the problem with Paypal are the payment blocks with no notification, the problem is their complete and utter refusal to talk to the customer about it . They have anti-fraud systems. Fine. Fucking let me talk to someone who can put their fingers on the keyboard and get it sorted out without a front page article on Hacker News, Reddit, and The Consumerist to shame them into action.

PayPal has been trying hard to change this image. David Marcus, who took the helm, has been shifting focus on customer satisfaction. Here is an interesting article on David Marcus: http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/12/if-its-not-broke-break-it-h...

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#156
post #149

We were in the middle of migrating from PayPal to Braintree for a marketplace solution. Anyone have documentation or comments on Stripe vs. Balancedpayments.com vs. Braintree for marketplaces?

Hi, I'm one of Balanced's co-founders. You might find this Quora post helpful [1]. Each company you mentioned chimes in about their relative strengths. From the Balanced side, here's why I think we stand out:

Balanced has been doing nothing but marketplace payments since early 2011, and have a history of coming out with the functionality most useful to marketplaces (and crowdfunders) 6-12 months before anyone else:

- Next-day payouts (same-day for WF)

- Stand-alone ACH payouts

- White-label merchant onboarding

- Dynamic soft-descriptor control

We've got a lot more coming out soon, and as an open company, you'll have a voice in exactly what we build.

That said, I'm not sure what your specific needs are, but shoot me an email at jkwade@balancedpayments.com and we can figure it out. Thanks!

[1] http://www.quora.com/With-the-release-of-Braintree-Marketpla...

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#157
post #60

It's disappointing, because among that market segment, Braintree is the only one that offers phone support, and for that, I fancy them over Stripe, Balanced, and others. That said, maybe now with Paypal support, they will reverse their stance on crowdfunding. If not, I'm desperate for a professional payment processor that doesn't ask me to send an email if I have an issue.

Hey Nathan, many of our customers at Balanced (those that want it) get a designated account manager whom they can call if any of our standard support channels fail them. If that doesn't work feel free to give my cell a ring: (Tucson, AZ area code)-869-1947

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busine…

If only PayPal had joined Braintree's "Credit Card Data Portability" initiative [1]. I'm betting that's dead now with them joining PayPal, if it's even still active. If it is, get your data out quick before PayPal can lock it in! [1]: https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/open-letter-to-the-ce...

I'm an engineer with Braintree. This deal will not affect our participation in the Credit Card Portability Standard.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#159
post #55

Boy, everyone is so negative about the purchase on here! Braintree's customer base is far too large at this point for PayPal to just shut it down ; that would be terrible PR because Braintree is critical to many businesses at this point. It's also not that easy to just go rip out one processor for another on a huge legacy code base. PayPal would be making things worse for themselves if they did that and this purchase…

I agree that it is still too early to tell if something good will come out of this or not. I am especially curious if Braintree customers will get access to PayPals superior transaction risk assessment technology. That might be huge for people that use Braintree for marketplaces.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Speaking to RTE News in Dublin, Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison said he and brother John plan to sell as soon as possible at the largest possible price". If you can't imagine the opposite quote ever happening then there's no point putting much weight on the initial one - no matter what the circumstance.

Except that that wasn't the quote.

Perhaps it would have been less snippety to say "What else can they say when asked?"
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