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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#301

Post by twitchard »

colinmhayes wrote: post #233
gk1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest barrier to late adopters is the learning curve and confidence: They worry that new tech will take too long to learn, and they're not confident it will work right. Right now a lot of people have no choice but to learn how to meet with Zoom, how to order with Instacart, how to communicate through Slack, ... And as they do, hopefully things are working out OK and they're building confidence in those technolo…

The biggest barrier to instacart is that the experience is awful. 80% of the time the deliverer calls to say they can't find half the items and half the time don't do what you tell them. Then it costs $10-20 extra, nah.

Still competitive with "sending husband out to get groceries"

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#302

Post by thesimon »

adambyrtek wrote: post #213
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German checking in. One of the reasons why it’s hard to get us to use a CC is that many of us don’t have credit cards. And why would we? (Except for online payments and other fringe cases.) However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speak…

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

>or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

Mostly banks and retailers colluding together to use a cheap domestic-only POS-only scheme (think Przelewy24, but offline or LINK but at POS).

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#303

Post by thesimon »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #222
adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

Probably a cultural thing. Debit card means you're responsible and take money out of low/zero interest checking account at the principal bank where we Germans hoard our money. Credit card means you're on shaky financial ground, deal with credit card companies with their fine print, risk punitive overdraft charges, and have probably no idea if you have any money left. Sadly, things are changing and many people seem to…

>Probably a cultural thing.

Associating Mastercard and Visa to credit and not debit as well.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#304

Post by mmkhd »

et2o wrote: post #224
antonkm wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swede here. Really baffling for me too. My kids have pretty much never even seen cash. I use the nationwide app Swish to send money to people using their phone number (almost every Swede is connected since it's pushed by all big banks) and only use contactless credit card. How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they…

Germans tend to take on very low levels of debt (speaking broadly). There are lots of hypotheses about the psychology behind it: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-31369185

I like the quit romantic explanation best, that debt in Germany has a moral component. "Debt" and "guilt" are nearly the same word, so taking on debt is a topic of moral philosophy: It's a sin ;-)

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#305

Post by dylz »

littlethings wrote: post #184

Stripe user here (Stripe Singapore) since 2016 and processed a loooot of money which was a life-changing thing for me and many other people. Patrick, I appreciate how supportive you are here so I hope you don't mind this turning into Q&A/support type of topic :D 1) Do you plan to lower the currency conversion fees for Singapore? We charge customers in USD but we are forced to convert to SGD and conversion fees adds u…

For 2, a dispute is not a cb - on paypal if someone chargebacks _on their card_, there is an entirely different workflow

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#306

Post by thesimon »

mssngrtrn wrote: post #218
antonkm wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swede here. Really baffling for me too. My kids have pretty much never even seen cash. I use the nationwide app Swish to send money to people using their phone number (almost every Swede is connected since it's pushed by all big banks) and only use contactless credit card. How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they…

Another German. We use "cards" all the time. But these are just cashless and tied to our SEPA accounts (so not a credit card).

>But these are just cashless and tied to our SEPA accounts (so not a credit card).

which wouldn't be a problem for shopping online if they had a Visa or MasterCard cobrand, as these can be debit and tied to your bank account as well.

It's only slowly changing with some Sparkassen issuing MasterCard debit cobranded cards in late fall (https://www.f-i.de/News/ITmagazin/Archiv/2020/Einfach-mobil-...)

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#307

Post by PixelPaul »

plantain wrote: post #136
pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

I agree with all this and it may be the reason I leave stripe soon.

I deal a lot in USD as an Australian company but stripe won’t allow us to charge in USD and settle into our USD bank accounts. But others will.

Also the refund issue is crazy, no other provider we use does it.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#308

Post by dalex00 »

pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

From sw development perspective how do you create the public documentation and internal system process documentation? Tools, process and responbilities would be interesting for me for such complex business modell. Hopefully someone can shine a light..

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#309

Post by adventured »

jackson1442 wrote: post #226
pc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging…

I'm honestly a bit surprised credit card companies haven't been more open to the option of lowering the cost of microtransactions, since that seems to be what the Internet's moving towards as a whole.

They'll drag their feet until they can't. It's a go first bunch-up. Eventually someone will do it as a competitive advantage attempt and the rest will fast-follow (you see this happen frequently in such markets, as with the $0 stock trading bunch-up & fast-follow that happened recently).

The various US credit card & processing companies have an extraordinary thing going for themselves. Visa and Mastercard have cartel-like margins (Visa's operating income margin for 4Q19 was 66%, you don't see that outside of maybe illicit drug operations or Facebook's monopoly in its earlier thinner incarnation pre-Russiagate). They're super sensitive to giving any ground on their fee levels, out of fear (correctly so) that they'll never get them back.

Before the market drop, Visa was worth more than all publicly traded banks in Europe combined (frankly that may still be true post market drop, as Visa hasn't declined all that much).

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#310

Post by infinitelurker »

pc wrote: post #279
plantain wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly. I understand they're not free, but I also understand Stripe does get a considerable portion back that they are no longer passing on? Couldn't this just have been applied to the problematic businesses then rather tha…

It varies based on the card type, country, and other things. We could expose all of that more directly but the trade-off there is obviously pricing complexity, which we'd like to avoid. In our analysis in making this change, we saw that this simply makes little difference for the vast majority of businesses. For example, if you're processing $100k/year and refund 5% of your payments (which would be on the high end of…

Are those fees also present for transactions that are refunded immediately before they batch (i.e. testing). Let's say a stripe IP wasn't whitelisted on the server and started being denied coming back, causing transactions to fail. If I want to do a quick live environment test on this it now costs my client money, which is not ideal.
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