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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

#81

Post by jacob019 »

Androider wrote: post #73
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…

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…

I agree with debaserab2. We use both PayPal Merchant Processing and Stripe. PayPal processes for us at 2.2% + $0.30. We use Stripe for the smaller charges where the $0.30 is prohibitive. There are many other options out there too. For any business to stay competitive it's important to keep costs down. Merchant fees are an easy one, do some research. For small businesses, the integration work isn't that hard. I suppose below a certain threshold it just isn't worth worrying about, but I would be wary of being too locked in with stripe or any other business for that matter.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#82

Post by floodfx »

This is pretty cool but to be pedantic this is actually API Gateway proxying requests to AWS Lambda not just a Lambda function. Zappa and other Serverless Frameworks sort of obfuscate the fact that API Gateway is setup in front of Lambda but that is what is happening here. Again, cool example.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#84

Post by ferentchak »

dheera wrote: post #83

Now if only my property manager could get with the beat and take electronic payments ... I still have to bike over to their office and drop off a physical check every month because they don't take anything else.

Can you use bill pay from your bank?

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#85

Post by rubicon33 »

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…

Hah. If you think 3% is bad, I'd love to know what you think about the 30% that Apple takes for in app purchases. You are forced to use their system (or your app gets rejected), so you have no option but to use their payment methods. Highway robbery if you ask me.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#86

Post by slice_of_life »

chimeracoder wrote: post #74
slice_of_life wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? 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 merchan…

>They are not allowed to charge customers more for paying via credit card that for paying via cash.

Now I get it. I'm not for it but I get it.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#87

Post by samstave »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #64
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.

Sounds like an opportunity for a person with a domain expertise could make a good living doing this for companies.

We had, at lockheed, hired a contracting company that would receive all our corp cell bills, go through them and go after the carriers for errors and savings and they just kept a percentage of the savings that we made from their efforts... it worked out well for both parties.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#88

Post by GhostVII »

rubicon33 wrote: post #85
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…

Hah. If you think 3% is bad, I'd love to know what you think about the 30% that Apple takes for in app purchases. You are forced to use their system (or your app gets rejected), so you have no option but to use their payment methods. Highway robbery if you ask me.

The difference is that Apple is providing you with tonnes of publicity and easy access through the app store, and is ensuring that your product works with all of their users. They are adding way more value than just convenient payments.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#89

Post by wonderwonder »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #11

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.

It is not cheap. It is however, remarkably well designed and easy to integrate with, provides excellent support via their freenode channel and allows for most of the outside of normal range issues to be easily handled on their dashboard.

I integrated with it for one of our sites and now have to integrate with cybersource for another and the difference in documentation alone is night and day.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#90

Post by rubicon33 »

GhostVII wrote: post #88
rubicon33 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. If you think 3% is bad, I'd love to know what you think about the 30% that Apple takes for in app purchases. You are forced to use their system (or your app gets rejected), so you have no option but to use their payment methods. Highway robbery if you ask me.

The difference is that Apple is providing you with tonnes of publicity and easy access through the app store, and is ensuring that your product works with all of their users. They are adding way more value than just convenient payments.

This is true, and that is definitely a difference worth pointing out.

I should have specified that even accounting for that difference 30% feels excessive considering your app, and the existence of it on their app store, also benefits their system (assuming your app is not completely pay locked).

It wasn't that long ago that Apple was using as a marketing tool, the number of App's on the app store.

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