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Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

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Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#291

Post by guard-of-terra »

rickmb wrote: post #268
guard-of-terra wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with tiny countries: - Global market players don't come because they don't think the effort would pay for itself. - The country is too tiny to make cloning business models feasible. In Europe, there are a lot of tiny countries: 3 baltic states, 3 transcaucasian states, moldavia, some former yugoslavian states. And then you have countries that are just small and not very rich, so they are always lat…

You're overstating the issue. There's only one thing that keeps most services from being available: the insane antiquated and utterly corrupt copyright laws. Without that, there would be no issue. Specific stuff like online payments very much depend on local context, and in many countries they barely even have the problem Stripe is trying to solve for the US market.

The copyright thing is real, and it does prevent access to those services. Ask anyone from a small country how it affects them.

It's also payments, logistics sometimes. You can't open in a part of country and leave other part behind, but you can do that with a mosaic of countries.

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#292

Post by axx »

monological wrote: post #139
boucher wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it does sometimes confuse people. This is something we're considering about changing (the flow worked differently when we were invite only), but we thought it was worth experimenting with a little longer. Mostly, I think it depends on the type of app you have. For something like 280 Slides (a previous project I worked on), it makes a lot of sense to get started right away without having to sign up. We'll see ho…

This is extremely confusing. Thought it was just a test account. Left depressed because I couldn't sign up.

yep, i thought the same.

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#293

Post by pdelgallego »

boucher wrote: post #11
almost wrote: post #8

US only at the moment. Anyone know if they have plans for the UK? I would dearly love to say goodbye to PayPal forever.

We're definitely working on expanding to other countries. There's no definite timeline just yet, but it's one of our top priorities.

Another one here from Denmark, but Spain will make the deal as well.

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#296

Post by the_gws »

barrydahlberg wrote: post #227
markbao wrote: post #5

Stripe pretty much takes payment processing kicking and screaming into 2011. Merchant accounts are a serious drag. I've opened a few and they've been nothing but headaches (especially if you're young—nobody trusts you.) Couple that with getting a gateway account, dealing with credit checks, monthly fees, monthly minimums, slow people in the payments industry, PCI compliance... Stripe takes payments and put them behin…

I would love to see someone drag it kicking and screaming outside of the US. :(

It would be great as a starting point to be able to charge in currency other than USD, I suppose that should be easier to set-up than accepting non-US based merchants. There are a lot of non-US people like me that have a SSN and US bank account from past US experiences that can already use Stripe in their home countries. But marketing a product in Italy with a price in USD won't cut it!

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#298

Post by davros »

Robbnotes wrote: post #248
davros wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We scale up pretty well. Everything that you get with a merchant account (correct statement text, money held in your name), you get with Stripe. Key scaling issue is pricing. 2.9% is fine for low volumes and no risk validation, but once you're turning over large volumes and have a track record of no chargebacks etc the comparison looks much worse. If you can offer businesses a pricing that 'scales' with substantial r…

I really like your idea of "pricing that scales." However, I feel the need to point out that no one can get a 1% rate on eCommerce transactions from their bank or anyone else. Interchange rates (cost) from Visa and MasterCard range from 1.71% + $.15 all the way up to 3.06% + $.10. Having said that, you're right about larger businesses finding Stripe's rates unpalatable. Maybe they're just trying to become the Square…

However, I feel the need to point out that no one can get a 1% rate on eCommerce transactions from their bank or anyone else.

I didn't mention 1% as idle guesswork, I have direct knowledge of several businesses paying close to 1% on online (card not present, no signature) transactions. I'm not saying its easy to negotiate good rates, but its possible, even for fairly early stage startups. I got 1.6% for a startup turning over only about $20k per month, no track record and 'non standard' business model.

So feel free to push your bank, get quotes from their competitors, they can almost certainly do better for you.

EDIT: I just notice that stripe is planning to introduce volume discounts - that would make a very nice product!

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#299

Post by tomlin »

barrydahlberg wrote: post #227
markbao wrote: post #5

Stripe pretty much takes payment processing kicking and screaming into 2011. Merchant accounts are a serious drag. I've opened a few and they've been nothing but headaches (especially if you're young—nobody trusts you.) Couple that with getting a gateway account, dealing with credit checks, monthly fees, monthly minimums, slow people in the payments industry, PCI compliance... Stripe takes payments and put them behin…

I would love to see someone drag it kicking and screaming outside of the US. :(

Would it be much extra effort to bring to Canada? I'd use this today if I could.

Re: Stripe: instant payment processing for developers

#300

Post by jtheory »

bprater wrote: post #201
boucher wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no simple thing I can say here. There are situations where withholding funds might be required, but they should be exceedingly rare. In other words, we're hoping to eliminate false positives. In general, we're a tech company and we're looking for technical solutions to problems. We're also just culturally familiar with startups that explode in popularity, so we aren't worried about that kind of behavior.

You may want to seriously consider working on fleshing out this plan now. Paypal supposedly has thousands of people working in fraud control. When word gets out that Stripe makes it "dead simple" to process credit cards without a merchant account, the vampires will come out to play. And I'm truly excited for a service like yours. We need this. But be prepared.

PayPal isn't just a payments processor, so they have many more fraud scenarios to worry about than Stripe.

You can't use Stripe unless you have a bank account set up to receive funds, and you can't use Stripe to pay for things -- i.e., you can't launder fraudulent money by buying a ton of stuff online and having it shipped to an abandoned house.

In Stripe there's a very simple money trail, plus there's a week's delay before your charges are transferred into your account... which makes it tricky if you're hoping to run up lots of fraudulent charges then disappear with the cash before anyone notices. With PayPal the money trail could be very complicated indeed.

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