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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

#61

Post by aptwebapps »

slice_of_life wrote: post #51
kawsper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently it is legal for companies in the EU to ask the customer to pay the processing fees, some call it surcharging. EU seems to want to get rid of this practice, I wonder if it becomes a company expense, that we will see companies caring more about the processing fees.

I must say that I'm genuinely surprised by this phenomenon. One would think that it is a business' business to figure out how much to charge a customer. A willing customer will pay, an unwilling one won't. How is it a question of legality?

It's not actually illegal in the US to pass the processing fee to the customer, it's just against the contract you have to sign to get a merchant account. I don't know if the EU has a law or regulation prohibiting such contracts, but it seems possible.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#62

Post by ajainy »

Thanks for article. Though I known about Lambda for long time, but this is one nice example, how Lambda can be used. Now I am planning to use to develop some zapier like integrations.

-=-=

Having said that, before you jump into making free payment forms for your static site, keep PCI compliance in mind. (even if stripe is rendering form using js).

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#63

Post by [deleted] »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

This is what people are missing on Lambda. It's pay-to-play, and for 90% of the sites out there, they're paying too much in comparison. If you're running server instances 24x7 for an application that is doing serverless.io is a decent framework to get started (allows for local dev and testing, manages deployment) and is agnostic in terms of deployment target: AWS, IBM, Google coming soon, etc. The only reason we're n…

[deleted]

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#64

Post by robbiemitchell »

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…

The short answer is because time also costs money, whether it's your own or your employees -- both for setup and ongoing maintenance. Price is an important, but not the only part of the equation here.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#65

Post by encoderer »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

This is what people are missing on Lambda. It's pay-to-play, and for 90% of the sites out there, they're paying too much in comparison. If you're running server instances 24x7 for an application that is doing serverless.io is a decent framework to get started (allows for local dev and testing, manages deployment) and is agnostic in terms of deployment target: AWS, IBM, Google coming soon, etc. The only reason we're n…

This is doubly true with their generous free tier. It applies per-region so for some tasks you can spread workloads out across regions and reduce costs. Cronitor runs about 6 million multi-second lambda invocations a month for $20.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#66

Post by dangerboysteve »

cdolan wrote: post #36
kagx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing those companies? I'm especially curious since Stripe is not supported in my Country.

I'd suggest Pineapple Payments. They are a new company based upon the CardConnect platform, which was just acquired by FirstData. FirstData is one of the primary companies in the market, and the rates you get from Pineapple are "interchange optimized". Means you pay 2.9% for AMEX, but ~1.5% for VISA, Discover, etc. For B2B and even B2C, it's a fantastic savings if you're willing to do just a tiny bit more legwork tha…

From the Pineapple website: "We believe in transparent, simple pricing that is always customized to fit your usiness. Refreshing, right?"

But publishes no pricing and you have to click for a quote (fill in form for a call back). Really transparent!

Also when they quote low rates for Visa and MC are they including the rewards cards which carry higher fees and make up a majority of the transactions?

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#67

Post by nulagrithom »

hiciu wrote: post #40
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…

re worldpay - they may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. Their backend still does not support SNI for payment callbacks. I had to debug once my client's integration with their hosted payment form (the one under https://mms.cardsaveonlinepayments.com ) - and during debugging I have seen things like this: http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010735_1920x1043_scrot.png http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010743_1920x1043_scrot.png…

I worked with an ecommerce shop for a while that wanted to go with the cheaper payment processor through their bank.

We spent a lot of developer time getting that 0.05% rate difference to work. Yes, that's a lot over a year, but we were constantly discovering undocumented error codes and "interesting" corner cases. The processor went down often enough that we actually ended up configuring a backup payment gateway on top of it (manual failover -- and yes it was well used). A year later and we still didn't have all the bugs ironed out.

Additionally the "PCI Scan" through the bank couldn't handle a DNS name, only a fixed IP address. This was one among many other issues with the PCI scan that ended up wasting weeks of developer time. In the end they literally gave up on scanning the site and just gave it a pass.

Believe it or not (I didn't at the time) there's actually more to card processing and banking than just a rate. You definitely get what you pay for.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#68

Post by nulagrithom »

devdoomari wrote: post #42
hiciu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re worldpay - they may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. Their backend still does not support SNI for payment callbacks. I had to debug once my client's integration with their hosted payment form (the one under https://mms.cardsaveonlinepayments.com ) - and during debugging I have seen things like this: http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010735_1920x1043_scrot.png http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010743_1920x1043_scrot.png…

+1 even their website isn't https... (even for their contact-us page and quote page)

Also I think we just took it down...

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#70

Post by slice_of_life »

aptwebapps wrote: post #61
slice_of_life wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say that I'm genuinely surprised by this phenomenon. One would think that it is a business' business to figure out how much to charge a customer. A willing customer will pay, an unwilling one won't. How is it a question of legality?

It's not actually illegal in the US to pass the processing fee to the customer, it's just against the contract you have to sign to get a merchant account. I don't know if the EU has a law or regulation prohibiting such contracts, but it seems possible.

Correct me if I'm wrong; what you're saying is that merchant account providers have terms that dictate to merchants how they should price their products i.e. as a merchant you cannot pass the fee? (It seems incredibly stifling for the merchant to me but may be you can enlighten me on why it is in the interest of MAPs to have such a condition)

Do majority of MAPs in the US have this condition in their terms? And which MAPs don't have this condition?

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