121–130 of 146 posts
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Recurring payments have massive lock-in - typically there is no way to switch payment providers without requiring the user re-enter their payment details. You'll typically lose ~half the user's each time you do that...
Startup idea: wrapper around payments providers.
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Or rather, get a contract with your cloud provider and payment processor that clearly lays out the terms under which they will and won't suspend you. My previous company had a business contract with GCP and so wouldn't be cut off for, for example, a dodgy employee account tied to the business in some way. It's amazing how many people put their email and credit card in a form, pay sticker price for a service, and have…
How big would a business have to be for this to work with a company like Stripe?
By all means use another payment provider as leverage to negotiate better contracts and rates, but I think it's unnecessary from a business reliability standpoint until you're very big and Stripe's downtime level (very small) is a material business risk. Spoiler: almost no one is this big.
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What use case of money transfer doesn’t require reversibility for fraud prevention? I love credit cards because I can dispute transactions.
Venmo[1] does not have reversibility. Cash does not have reversibility. If users really wanted credit card functionality at the expense of its costs, you could build that as a layer on top, without forcing everybody in the system to use it. And consider, most disputes is not just about the quality of a product. That is handled with regular refunds. Credit card disputes are a lot of times because of fraud or card skim…
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My most important overhaul for our business was abstracting over payments and ensuring we weren’t dependent on any one processor for online checkouts. It doesn’t matter who you are with or how flexible they are, sooner or later, for logistical, account, network, or other issues, if you have only one payment provider it is going to be unavailable and you’re going to be losing money. If you’re on the .NET stack, our ab…
Reminds me of PHP's Omnipay https://github.com/thephpleague/omnipay
Then our real nightmare happened. We are subject to potential dispute fee running more than $50-80k. We wanted to avoid disputes and so we requested Stripe to help us immediately refund all the money. They again did not respond. So, we painstakingly manually returned every payment one payment at a time. Finally they agreed to cover the dispute fee (which would have sunk our company). With the promise that they won't cover next time. uff, how do we even control that,
And then, they briefly suspended our account. And then revoked after some days saying it was a mistake. And then activated security radar, which basically is blocking all genuine payments now. But, we don't know what the alternative is. Is there an alternative?
We are constantly working on the nightmare that any
Then our real nightmare happened. We are subject to potential dispute fee running to several tens of thousands of dollars. We wanted to avoid disputes and so we requested Stripe to help us immediately refund all the money so we can avoid disputes. They again did not respond to solve. So, we painstakingly manually returned every payment, one payment at a time. Finally they agreed to cover the dispute fee (which would have sunk our company) of whatever was disputed (thanks to them). But they warned us they won't cover next time. uff, how do we even control that.
And then, they briefly suspended our account. And then revoked after some days saying it was a mistake. And then we activated security radar, which basically is blocking most genuine payments now. But, we don't know what the alternative is. Is there an alternative?
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Maybe this is a good place to ask the question: 1. Why is stripe a seemingly preferred payment processor for HN crowd? 2. Is there no ( edit: real ) competition or is the competition similarly bad ( or somehow worse )? edit: Instead of replying individually, I decided to edit this section. Thank you everyone for the background(s). It does answer a lot of the questions I had. I perused their site and I can absolutely…
Once upon a time, it was like a breath of fresh air. Originally pitched as a dev-first payment API, it was vastly easier to get up and running than other options at the time. In recent years it has suffered under the weight of its own success. The simplicity and ease of use it once promised has been buried beneath a now-bloated and obtuse API. The user interface has struggled to keep up with the feature creep and it…
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This x 1000! Do kids these days not realize you can negotiate anything and everything with your vendors/suppliers/partners? Yes, most SaaS companies LOVE it when you sign up for one of their standard plans, using THEIR standard T&C's, and standard payments. But, DID YOU KNOW, if something is critical to your business, you can negotiate directly with pretty much every business on the face of the planet, and if your sp…
How much do you need to spend to negotiate with Google?
Not sure if this has changed recently, but this was in about 2018/2019.
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My most important overhaul for our business was abstracting over payments and ensuring we weren’t dependent on any one processor for online checkouts. It doesn’t matter who you are with or how flexible they are, sooner or later, for logistical, account, network, or other issues, if you have only one payment provider it is going to be unavailable and you’re going to be losing money. If you’re on the .NET stack, our ab…
Reminds me of PHP's Omnipay https://github.com/thephpleague/omnipay
I think abstracting over payment APIs has gotten so much more difficult this side of 2014 or so. They’re doing all they can to achieve consumer lock-in and trying mighty hard to each offer their own custom services that they try really hard to convince you need and can’t live without, and invariably there might be something in there you want to support in your abstraction, sometimes necessitating cascading architectural changes. This is probably the third “major overhaul” of the abstractions we’ve written as a result.
Monthly HN Stripe customer support thread
Yes - more often, in fact. Here are a few of the recent ones: Stripe account suffered a card test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688298 - Nov 2022 (33 comments) Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299222 - Oct 2022 (114 comments) Don’t use Stripe. I am trying to save you from my mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254485 - Oct 2022 (2…