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Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

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Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#81

Post by tallytarik »

ddorian43 wrote: post #72
tallytarik wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Australia it’s on this page under Withdrawals Out of PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/au/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees Coincidentally they added the 3% withdrawal fee soon after Wise became a popular bank account option. PayPal was a great choice until then!

But it has a max-fee of $10 if you withdraw to an USD card, correct? So you can open an USD card on wise and withdraw there? But they probably have a limit? If yes, there's no workaround?

That’s interesting, I didn’t know withdrawing to a card in USD was possible.

Maybe if I ever have to implement PayPal again I’ll test it out :)

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#82

Post by GordonS »

stevoski wrote: post #6
sleepyhead wrote: post #3

"Businesses in the EEA who are paying out in USD to a US-domiciled bank account will now incur a 1% fee, with a minimum fee of US$2.50 per payout." This is absurd. A 1% fee to transfer USD to a USD bank account? The alternative is to charge in another currency - which Stripe will put a 2% currency fee on. This is already on top of their expensive transaction costs. Will actively look for alternatives now.

Yeah, this one is a bit over the top. 1% fee for USD to USD transfer. People from Stripe will probably appear in this discussion any moment now. It’ll be interesting seeing them try to explain this one.

I might be wrong, but I've a sneaking suspicion that we're not going to see the usual suspects from Stripe chiming in this time...

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#83

Post by amelius »

makeitdouble wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there open source libraries available that abstract away the payment processor?

You'd still need certifications to handle the info, and negociate with each issuer to get access. From memory they have legal obligation to open an API and give access, but no real penalty if it doesn't work or is utterly garbage or impractical.

I think you typically need to have a key only. You could get that key from their admin page, and hand it to the abstraction layer. Seems simple enough?

Not sure what you mean by impractical API. If their API is not practical, then nobody would use it, I suppose. If it is barely practical, then an abstraction layer would be a godsent.

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#84

Post by rafram »

anovikov wrote: post #60
capableweb wrote: post #4

Some European alternatives you might be able to find/negotiate better fees with: - mollie (Netherlands) - adyen (Netherlands) - Klarna (Sweden) - Paylike (Denmark) - Mangopay (Luxembourg) - Quickpay (Denmark) (added in edit) The ones I've tried of those, have an OK development experience, maybe not as polished as Stripe, but much better than the alternatives that were around before Stripe (huge hassle back then). Ide…

Names of the last 2 and maybe 3 sound very Russian to me. Are they just registered there, but really these are Russian own businesses?

What does “sound very Russian” even mean?

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#85

Post by pjan »

martinald wrote: post #62
pjan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand, you can payout in USD on a EEA domiciled account, and you won’t be incurring any fees. It’s the crossborder settlement which they charge for, which I don’t think is crazy, as it just reflects the underlying costs Stripe must be incurring themselves. As someone who ran a business in multiple countries, the bank always charged similar fees for these transfers between accounts. Stripe letting me…

1% is enormous for this. I think the cost of a SWIFT transfer is maybe $3 to them, regardless of amount. If you're doing $100k/month of USD sales and payout once a week, it is a huge markup. They are clearly losing money on their (really expensive) forex fees so are trying to recoup this by this payment. There is no intrinsic reason I see why the fees are so high for this. Edit to add: they actually use ACH for US ba…

Again, in my understanding is Stripe not forcing you to—-as a EEA business——settle USD in a US domiciled account; you can settle the USD in an EEA domiciled account and not incur the cost. If you then want to repatriate the money to the US with your bank, you can do so yourself.

I also just looked it up how much this costs with my bank, and it's a minimum fee of $25 + agent/intermediary bank fees on top of it, for amounts less than $5,0000.

I assume that Stripe can negotiate better rates though, but for the sake of simple pricing, and cost-averaging over different amounts (which are, given that they serve the long tail, likely heavy weighted on smaller amounts), it is not inconceivable that this 1% is closer to cost than one might imagine.

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#86

Post by hanniabu »

01acheru wrote: post #2

Something needs to change in the digital payments sector. 1.5% is ok-ish but 3.25% to accept foreign cards in the EU is a lot of money! I understand that costs are higher when using credit cards because of the credit part that introduces risk, but in my case for example I have a debit card that runs also over Mastercard, so either I have the money or I don't. Why should a merchant be charged the same fee of using a r…

> Something needs to change in the digital payments sector

Ethereum solves this, just use stablecoins

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#87

Post by gorbypark »

tallytarik wrote: post #67
pjc50 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you've got a UK bank account, so you can just use that and take on the currency risk and transaction fees of Wise or similar?

If you have a USD-denominated bank account, based in UK or elsewhere, you’ll be hit with the 1% fee. If you have a bank account in another currency, you’ll be charged a 2% currency conversion fee from USD to your currency.

I dont know if it’s common in other countries, but Canadian banks offer USD denominated accounts. From the wording, it seems like only if you are paying USD into a US bank account you pay the fee. Presumably paying USD into a non US bank account (in USD) wouldn’t incur this fee. At least I’d hope so!

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#88

Post by quelltext »

carlosjobim wrote: post #58
capableweb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fee gets taken regardless. Also, too many disputes (guessing overturned disputes are calculated differently than uphold ones) can lead to further fines: > If the dispute activity for your business exceeds the thresholds set by the networks for a prolonged period of time (usually multiple months), you might be subject to fines. https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/measuring

>The fee gets taken regardless. The fee gets paid back in full to you by Stripe if you win the dispute.

Not anymore (in Europe at least) from the article.

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#89

Post by GordonS »

petercooper wrote: post #65

At first I thought, "well, inflation is affecting everyone." Then I realized if prices are going up due to inflation, Stripe's collected fees go up anyway. So now they're benefitting to the second degree with a higher percentage of already inflating revenues ;-) We'll put up our prices more to counteract it, and on it goes. It's not a terrible deal even at this level. We routinely see 4-5% creamed off the top of wire…

> We routinely see 4-5% creamed off the top of wire transfers we receive from the US through exchange rate variations, random bank fees, etc.

Hmm, I'm in the UK, and the variance in currerncy exchange we see is usually 2.4% in the bank's favour, usually with an additional fixed fee of £20. 5% sounds like madness!

For EU bank transfers, it's more like a 2% exchange variance, with zero fixed fee... so Stripe is now looking expensive, at least for our UK and EU payments :(

Re: Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

#90

Post by dachryn »

gggggg5 wrote: post #51
capableweb wrote: post #4

Some European alternatives you might be able to find/negotiate better fees with: - mollie (Netherlands) - adyen (Netherlands) - Klarna (Sweden) - Paylike (Denmark) - Mangopay (Luxembourg) - Quickpay (Denmark) (added in edit) The ones I've tried of those, have an OK development experience, maybe not as polished as Stripe, but much better than the alternatives that were around before Stripe (huge hassle back then). Ide…

>This strikes me as weird. User buys something from me, regrets it and issues a chargeback, dispute gets started and bank says I did nothing wrong, so the charge still sticks, but Stripe gets to keep the fee for handling the dispute? You should include this in your contract terms with the customer and collect the dispute fee from them. It's not reasonable of you to expect Stripe to just absorb this cost.

good luck actually getting that money.

What are you going to do, sue over 20 euro?

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