71–80 of 131 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe in the united states it is simply against the terms of service of the card provider. I imagine the law isn't "allowing" customers to pay processing fees, it's simply preventing the provider from setting those terms.
No longer true. Merchants can charge CC users in the US a surcharge.
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.
Depends on the state. It's no longer illegal federally, but many states, including the four largest states[0], still prohibit it. And if they pass the fees on, they have to pass it on for all credit cards, due to the specifics of a court settlement a few years back.
In addition, any merchant that accepts American Express is also prohibited from passing on fees for any credit card, because Amex prohibits passing on fees, and you can't pass fees for Visa/Mastercard and not Amex (see above).
So, very few merchants actually do.
[0] California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas
~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 services I need to run the back-office operations of my business including bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, business metrics, customer support etc. all use Stripe data and APIs. Writing our own integrations, or worse, trying to poorly replicate some third party service, would be money poorly spent. It would take a very large transaction volume for it to make any sense to spend engineering time here, and arguably the end result will be qualitatively worse than just going with the market leader. Even if that calculation does come out positive, you still have to consider whether the engineering time wouldn't provide an even higher ROI by being invested into your core product instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They are not allowed to charge customers more for paying via credit card that for paying via cash. This is the law in some states, and in addition many merchant contracts stipulate it as well.
Sometimes you'll see merchants offer a "cash discount", which is technically prohibited too, but small merchants can sometimes fly under the radar if it's not too blatant.
I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?
~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…
Stripe has an extensive ecosystem of services that integrates with it, literally hundreds ( https://stripe.com/works-with ). The services I need to run the back-office operations of my business including bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, business metrics, customer support etc. all use Stripe data and APIs. Writing our own integrations, or worse, trying to poorly replicate some third party service, would be money poor…
It doesn't take a large transaction volume to justify the engineering cost at all. We're talking entire percentages of revenue. The ROI justification is going to be a hard one to beat in this case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lived for some time in Romania and I think I can see both sides of the issue here. Romania has some problems and companies like Stripe have to decide whether it is worth it to them to open up to a country that would in turn most likely (at least initially) yield relatively small volume in real transactions and a disproportionate amount of volume in fraud. From the Romanian point of view this sucks because those…
But if Stripe allows Romania it most probably will be used by local companies for worldwide internet payments, so local fraud and corruption won't be affecting Stripe per se. Actually, I don't exactly understand what Stripe do to "prepare" for the launch in a country? They are expanding very gradually, and there are payment processing companies which basically blanket-cover almost whole world. For example Stripe stil…
For now, adding countries that have the best combination of low fraud and least difficulty or barrier to entry is the best choice. Romania doesn't have the former relative to Germany and Austria, as such, it's not on the list.
Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, the others mentioned have a monthly fee and then lower transaction fees. So Stripe isn't remarkably cheap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hassle. Much less than it used to be. It's also 2-point-whatever percent of all your revenue. The tipping point isn't as far out as you might think. I'm not pretending it's for everybody, again, I'm just shocked that "oh we'll use Stripe because it's easy and cheaper than PayPal" is the group mentality (esp here).
If you're doing less than a hundred thousand a year in revenue, you will likely save in development costs what you would pay in fees (3% x $100,000 = $3,000 = ~week of development costs). Depending on which Stripe features you make use of and would have to re-implement yourself it may even make Stripe more affordable up to a couple of hundred thousand in revenue. That makes it very attractive for side projects or boo…
It always surprises me how quickly people are willing to adopt stripe without even making this calculation on their own and considering competitors.
I suspect since they are YC funded they give discounts to other YC companies which makes it a more viable option and helps foster the ultra positive stripe sentiment you see on HN. I think there are a lot of people who eat up the hype without doing any real analysis of their own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stripe has an extensive ecosystem of services that integrates with it, literally hundreds ( https://stripe.com/works-with ). The services I need to run the back-office operations of my business including bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, business metrics, customer support etc. all use Stripe data and APIs. Writing our own integrations, or worse, trying to poorly replicate some third party service, would be money poor…
Integrating with a merchant payment gateway isn't rocket science. A few weeks is easily worth the cost (it doesn't take that long, either, most have decent enough APIs or SDKs that may not be stripe quality but still are simple to integrate with). It doesn't take a large transaction volume to justify the engineering cost at all. We're talking entire percentages of revenue. The ROI justification is going to be a hard…