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Stripe Checkout

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Re: Stripe Checkout

#151

Post by bertil »

dirtae wrote: post #23

Stripe Checkout is nice, but unfortunately it's not suitable for us, since the "Remember me" checkbox cannot be hidden. "Remember me" is confusing for users. What is being remembered? By whom? When you're dealing with users who may already be concerned about whether it's secure to enter their credit card number into your website, I feel like the "Remember me" box is just adding another layer of confusion and concern.…

Sorry, point of confusion here: what do you want to happen without the line? It's not clear from your comment.

Let Stripe remember the customer without asking (because repeated payments are an obvious thing, and you have to keep the details in your books anyway, so for them, it's a no brainer) or on the contrary don't even consider the possibility (because you don't expect any repeated sales)? In the first case, the problem is that you point it out to customer and make them scare of something innocuous, that they would find obvious if they had to go through it; in the second, you force them to click out an unnecessary option.

Comments seem to point at both options, without realising the confusion.

Re: Stripe Checkout

#152

Post by aslakhellesoy »

Stripe checkout is great, but I really miss the ability to add custom fields to the form, such as VAT number and Company name.

I realise that allowing to add a whole bunch of fields can hamper usability, but I have to collect the VAT number in order to figure out how much to charge the customer.

Does anyone have a recommendation about what to do here? Roll our own form and lose all the nice stuff from Stripe Checkout? Display a new form for VAT after displaying checkout, and charge after that?

Re: Stripe Checkout

#153

Post by riteshpatel »

pc wrote: post #80
downandout wrote: post #57

Now if they only did same/next day payouts. The founder once said this was possible if you emailed him. I emailed him and got zero response, from him or anyone else, so I'm guessing they are only doing this for super high volume merchants.

Oh no, I'm sorry. I've no idea what happened. Want to try my personal email? patrick@collison.ie.

Hey Patrick,

Any chance this is possible for us as well? This is the only reason we're using PayPal for the majority of transactions at the moment.

Thanks, Ritesh

Re: Stripe Checkout

#154

Post by saurik »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #104
pc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Tl;dr on the below: the changes we make to Checkout are designed to increase our merchants' revenue. If a change doesn't do that, it will be reverted.] The confusion point you cite was our biggest concern in building the "Remember me" functionality. On the one hand, it's clearly good for our merchants* if customers don't have to constantly retype their card details. On the other hand, it'd be bad if we were scaring…

I’m going to respectfully disagree with almost everything there, based on our experience. TL;DR: The changes do not benefit us or our customers, caught us by surprise, and created customer support issues almost immediately. As a direct result, we are now working on moving to a stripe.js form where Stripe’s branding will be hidden as much as possible and we retain full control of our user experience. I do want to star…

> Perhaps the most surprising thing to me, as someone who’s seen overwhelmingly positive views of Stripe on forums like HN, is that the Stripe brand was a clear negative in the sign-up process. In the UK, Stripe is not a well-known organisation in the way that say a high street bank is...

I am pretty shocked this came as a surprise... customers are not developers: Stripe is just a credit card processing company, providing no user-focussed services (as does your bank, PayPal, or Square, all companies a user might plausibly have heard of and could theoretically have some positive trust associated with: of course, one would also be surprised if a user recognized "Square" even if they use one every day at some restaurant, and depending on your target market they might also not have heard of "PayPal", and while large banks tend to have a lot of brand recognition, it tends to be tied to local regions where the bank operates).

Re: Stripe Checkout

#155

Post by saurik »

pc wrote: post #29
dirtae wrote: post #23

Stripe Checkout is nice, but unfortunately it's not suitable for us, since the "Remember me" checkbox cannot be hidden. "Remember me" is confusing for users. What is being remembered? By whom? When you're dealing with users who may already be concerned about whether it's secure to enter their credit card number into your website, I feel like the "Remember me" box is just adding another layer of confusion and concern.…

[Tl;dr on the below: the changes we make to Checkout are designed to increase our merchants' revenue. If a change doesn't do that, it will be reverted.] The confusion point you cite was our biggest concern in building the "Remember me" functionality. On the one hand, it's clearly good for our merchants* if customers don't have to constantly retype their card details. On the other hand, it'd be bad if we were scaring…

> We consider it our job to optimize the Checkout in order to maximize our users' revenue.

Even if you ran a controlled study and determined that this checkbox increases conversion by 100x for 99% of your merchants, it is still quite possible that for someone out there with some business in some selected market it harms them (potentially enough to be devastating). There is a reason why PayPal has tons of tiny little options for manipulating parts of the display given to the user, and it isn't because they are somehow incompetent. Unless you are running, per merchant, some kind of machine learning algorithm that optimizes the display for them, thinking you can optimize the flow for everyone and then should purposely not provide options because the merchant might harm themselves if they don't listen to your advice is nothing but hubris.

Re: Stripe Checkout

#156

Post by saurik »

pc wrote: post #130
paul_f wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems your customers are telling you EXACTLY what they want - an option to remove 'Remember Me'. You don't seem to want a conversation about it so much as a chance to sell people on it.

I'm sorry that it comes across this way. Checkout is an optional product. I've tried to explain that 1) we'll remove it if we find data that suggests it's bad, and 2) we're in no way strongly opposed to removing it. I mean, we're not wedded to any particular aspect of Checkout -- we just want to stay true to the goal of making informed, data-driven decisions and reducing complexity for merchants. If it's bad, we won'…

> we'll remove it if we find data that suggests it's bad

So how about instead of saying "let's have coffee" you look at the accounts of some of these people complaining to verify for yourself the things they are saying (such as "lower conversion")? If you feel Stripe doesn't have the data requires themselves to determine this, maybe asking a few of these merchants to send you a report documenting the sales penalty they experienced? This doesn't seem like a very difficult situation to verify, and it sounds like you will be able to learn something really valuable in a really short amount of time that could affect not just this feature but your entire product roadmap.

The "let's have coffee" line (which you tried to use on me as well back when I was demonstrating API flaws and limitations in Stripe a couple years ago ;P) is really difficult to interpret as a "data-oriented" approach to helping merchants: "let's talk about this in person" almost always translates to "I'm a people person who is good at convincing people of things in real time, so how about we move this conversation from a medium that involves long, thought-through arguments that can be backed up by data to one where we are both forced to think on our feet and operate out if memory" ;P.

> If it's bad, we won't just add an option to remove it -- we'll remove it for everyone.

What everyone here is trying to tell you is that this feature probably works well for some merchants (I mean, you even claim to have tested this yourself, so clearly it must) but horribly for others. Is this really an impossible idea to you? :( The people complaining also spent a bunch of time not "just complaining", but providing reasons why their situation caused the flow to be awkward, and those reasons clearly don't apply to all merchants: in some cases people have even tried to determine "the core difference" (one-shot vs. repeat sales). This would be a great opportunity to not pull a "let's have coffee", but instead dive into the data and specifics of the complaints with the people who are trying to help you.

Re: Stripe Checkout

#158

Post by cvburgess »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #104
pc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Tl;dr on the below: the changes we make to Checkout are designed to increase our merchants' revenue. If a change doesn't do that, it will be reverted.] The confusion point you cite was our biggest concern in building the "Remember me" functionality. On the one hand, it's clearly good for our merchants* if customers don't have to constantly retype their card details. On the other hand, it'd be bad if we were scaring…

I’m going to respectfully disagree with almost everything there, based on our experience. TL;DR: The changes do not benefit us or our customers, caught us by surprise, and created customer support issues almost immediately. As a direct result, we are now working on moving to a stripe.js form where Stripe’s branding will be hidden as much as possible and we retain full control of our user experience. I do want to star…

I've experienced this first hand. Stripe is great, and so (was) checkout, but the silent iteration is terrible as a developer. You wind up with support calls saying "why does this look different" and you have no idea anything changed. It's tiring.

Re: Stripe Checkout

#160

Post by pc »

saurik wrote: post #156
pc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that it comes across this way. Checkout is an optional product. I've tried to explain that 1) we'll remove it if we find data that suggests it's bad, and 2) we're in no way strongly opposed to removing it. I mean, we're not wedded to any particular aspect of Checkout -- we just want to stay true to the goal of making informed, data-driven decisions and reducing complexity for merchants. If it's bad, we won'…

> we'll remove it if we find data that suggests it's bad So how about instead of saying "let's have coffee" you look at the accounts of some of these people complaining to verify for yourself the things they are saying (such as "lower conversion")? If you feel Stripe doesn't have the data requires themselves to determine this, maybe asking a few of these merchants to send you a report documenting the sales penalty th…

I don't think that "talking" and "analyzing" is a dichotomy. (As shown by the very helpful feedback on this thread.) We've been watching the numbers closely, and we'll continue to do so. If we find that there are merchants for which this works horribly, we'll absolutely rethink our approach. (And they're of course free to not use Checkout.) Coffees drunk and lunches consumed -- i.e., HN threads continued in a higher-bandwith medium -- are orthogonal.
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