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Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

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Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#121

Post by Lazare »

oliwarner wrote: post #15

~3%, dirt cheap?! Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I know Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around. In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay…

> Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay are the best rates I've seen recently.

Worldpay starts around 2.75% + £0.20 per transaction; I'm sure you can negotiate them down, but not THAT low. Not if you're asking them to provide the merchant account AND process online/card not present payments. You're not getting a merchant account + payment gateway for less than a 1% fee. Not without stupidly massive volume, anyhow.

The reality is Stripe's rates are actually competitive; they're not wildly expensive, and they're not even the most expensive.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#122

Post by oliwarner »

Lazare wrote: post #121
oliwarner wrote: post #15

~3%, dirt cheap?! Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I know Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around. In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay…

> Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay are the best rates I've seen recently. Worldpay starts around 2.75% + £0.20 per transaction; I'm sure you can negotiate them down, but not THAT low. Not if you're asking them to provide the merchant account AND process onlin…

> but not THAT low

Honestly, I have two clients with Wordpay at ~0.85%, no contract fees. Volume isn't crazy either. I can't tell you if they caught WP at a particularly giddy phase but I guess they're trying to compete again. They've been around for 28 years and these whippersnappers like Stripe must be starting to hurt their bottom line.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#123

Post by pyre »

slice_of_life wrote: post #106
pyre wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of "do you charge 3% more for credit card payments to cover the charges from the credit card companies, but leave off that fee for non-credit card payments?" Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea. IIRC, this stuff is usually handled in your contract with the credit card processor. The las…

>Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea. This is obviously good for the card companies and to a degree the digital payments landscape as a whole. I do however see how it can be a problem for small merchants who can't negotiate for better rates with MAPs due to lack of volume. A 2 - 3% fee is quite signifi…

Well, you're also missing things like the onerous process that some of the processors would have you go through to sign up. While I haven't been the person to actually setup a Stripe account, my impression is that it's pretty light-weight. From what I remember the business people having to go through to sign up for a merchant account with a processor (for a 100% online business) back in ~2010, it was practically like signing up for a mortgage. There was also back-and-forth between different "levels" of employees on the other side of things. At one point, IIRC the process even stalled because their end stopped responding to enquiries from our company. On top of that we were forced to use their Java middleware crap even though we weren't a Java shop. They made you feel like they couldn't care less about your business.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#124

Post by slice_of_life »

pyre wrote: post #123
slice_of_life wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea. This is obviously good for the card companies and to a degree the digital payments landscape as a whole. I do however see how it can be a problem for small merchants who can't negotiate for better rates with MAPs due to lack of volume. A 2 - 3% fee is quite signifi…

Well, you're also missing things like the onerous process that some of the processors would have you go through to sign up. While I haven't been the person to actually setup a Stripe account, my impression is that it's pretty light-weight. From what I remember the business people having to go through to sign up for a merchant account with a processor (for a 100% online business) back in ~2010, it was practically like…

Well, the onboarding process in the past you've described seems like hell. May be merchants should simply accept to bite the bullet on this one and accept it as part of the cost of doing business.

Now that you've mentioned stripe; I am in the process of setting up an Australian company with stripe; so far the docs are easy to digest and it seems waaay easier (and cleaner) than my previous experience with paypal.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#125

Post by stevekemp »

olegkikin wrote: post #108
stevekemp wrote: post #100

Remember that if you use stripe subscriptions you absolutely must setup a webhook, or otherwise examine your logs every month. Why? If a customer is subscribed to a "plan", and their payment fails it is retried three days later, then five days later, then eight days later, and if all three payments fail they're quietly unsubscribed without any notification being sent to you! I have a toy project which has paying cust…

Out of curiosity, did any of these customers return?

I had three users who were really affected, and all of them paid up. None of them "left" really, they were receiving a service from me, just not paying for it.

The user who had a years free service I wrote down a little - they should have paid around £140, and I suggested we'd be good if they paid £100.

Perhaps I went too easy on them, but I was trying to be nice and it wasn't their fault I'd not been paid, not directly. The other couple of users ranged from 2-8 months of non-payment, or so, and I agreed with each that I'd bill them the full amount as a one-off charge.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#126

Post by [deleted] »

debaserab2 wrote: post #76
Androider wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe has an extensive ecosystem of services that integrates with it, literally hundreds ( https://stripe.com/works-with ). The services I need to run the back-office operations of my business including bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, business metrics, customer support etc. all use Stripe data and APIs. Writing our own integrations, or worse, trying to poorly replicate some third party service, would be money poor…

Integrating with a merchant payment gateway isn't rocket science. A few weeks is easily worth the cost (it doesn't take that long, either, most have decent enough APIs or SDKs that may not be stripe quality but still are simple to integrate with). It doesn't take a large transaction volume to justify the engineering cost at all. We're talking entire percentages of revenue. The ROI justification is going to be a hard…

[deleted]

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#127

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #112
likelynew wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't $100/year enough for the access and making sure that product works fine. For publicity, it's two way and nowhere should take 30% if there is a free market for app store.

Back in the day when software was sold in boxes in retail stores, I guarantee those retail stores were taking well north of 30%.

Because they've stocked the products and paid for them, and threw away/discounted everything they did not sell. Vendors could only get It always amazes me how people do not understand the fundamentals of retailing.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#128

Post by fenesiistvan »

aquadrop wrote: post #116
jhall1468 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws vary, and they still have to build out the infrastructure to support whatever bank they use in a given country and the laws and implementation differ dramatically. For now, adding countries that have the best combination of low fraud and least difficulty or barrier to entry is the best choice. Romania doesn't have the former relative to Germany and Austria, as such, it's not on the list.

But why do they need to use a bank in Romania and create some infrastructure for that? Can't they just use some bank in eurozone to gather money from customers and send out payments to the users in their local Romania bank, or something like that? There are payment providers which do that.

I think that it is more complicated then this.

There are a lot of laws involved when you wish to become a financial operator and that can be a real pain for Stripe to handle in each country separately. PayPal managed to do this. For example PayPal operates as a bank in Europe to be able to conform to laws.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#129

Post by fenesiistvan »

gerenuk wrote: post #22
fenesiistvan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit overkill to establish a US company just to be able to accept payments. The only real alternative is PayPal at this moment.

Check out fastspring.com

We are using share*it: https://www.mycommerce.com/ Mostly same as your suggestion.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#130

Post by dheera »

clintonb wrote: post #117
dheera wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so, but it requires me to call them to set up, I hate calling and being put on hold. And also, phone calling usually involves walking out to the street so I can get reception, yell my social security number in front of a bunch of strangers walking by, and somehow verify my account number and various transactions from my account which I can't do without going back inside, logging in from a computer and checkin…

Most banks allow you to setup bill pay online. The bank will mail a check on your schedule. No need for phones.

I wish. Both of my banks bring up messages saying to call customer service when I click on their respective Bill Pay links. So much for "online" banking. We're back in the 80's.
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