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I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. It's about the functionality, not the promotion. The whole premise of Stripe is that a richer, more powerful stack of APIs -- ra

by pc 11y ago

I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. It's about the functionality, not the promotion. The whole premise of Stripe is that a richer, more powerful stack of APIs -- rather than the bare-bones electrical outlet to the credit card networks that existed before -- is a better solution for most businesses. Whatever success (and any recognition) we've had to date follows from that; not the other way around. I wish something like Stripe existed in 2004. If it had, we wouldn't have had to start the company...

ilikerashers 11y ago
Agreed. Payments has been a quite stinky industry with lots of dodgy monopolies (see government payment providers for particularly bad examples). I'd just like to see a more balanced debate on payments. Its a very busy industry with plenty of niches which Stripe clearly fits, but it's also a very boring industry. I get surprised seeing this heavily promoted on a site I use for opinion and news.
revelation 11y ago
Uh, frankly, all you are offering is yet another credit card gateway. There are large countries out there where credit card usage is much much lower compared to debit cards. So it's cool you're translating stuff, but none of it matters if customers can't pay. It's 2015, you need PayPal level of compatibility.
- jeff18 11y ago
  You mean Stripe should add things like this? https://stripe.com/alipay https://stripe.com/alipay
_kyran 11y ago
I'm a huge fan of Stripe and the benefits of using it, although I've had close to 40% of all international customers receive a 'your card was declined error'. I've had to ask them to call up their bank/card provider and request for the restriction to be removed. Is Stripe's ease of onboarding/getting started causing such a high rate of flagged transactions? What's going on behind the scenes between banks and payment services providers and is this something that could be improved in the future?
- Chris_Newton 11y ago
  I’m sorry to read of your problem, but also glad to know it’s not just us. The last time I checked, we were losing more subscribers to mysterious international card failures on Stripe than all other causes (including deliberate cancellations) put together, but I’m talking about a small side business here so I wondered whether we’d just been an unfortunate statistical anomaly. I did contact Stripe support a while ago to ask about this, but they didn’t seem to know any more than we did and weren’t able to do anything to improve the situation. The best theory we have so far is that given how many of the transactions fail in the second month of a subscription and the greater proportion of international failures compared to domestic, we’re coming in borderline on a lot of US banks’ fraud checks, perhaps because we’re abroad and charging in a different currency. Then when we don’t have the card security code after the first payment, maybe that pushes us over the line. We’re hardly a high risk business generally, though, so it would be interesting to know whether this problem is inherent to accepting international card payments or something more specific to Stripe. Naturally we’re investigating whether general improvements we could make, such as charging in local currencies or better Dunning management, would improve the success rate. However, it’s hard to make sensible decisions with so little useful data about the cause of the problem, particularly for a business with limited development resources available that we’d rather spend on developing the service itself. In the meantime, I read these anecdotes on HN about businesses aiming for at least 95 or 98 percent retention month-to-month and dream...

by pc 11y ago

ilikerashers 11y ago

Agreed. Payments has been a quite stinky industry with lots of dodgy monopolies (see government payment providers for particularly bad examples). I'd just like to see a more balanced debate on payments. Its a very busy industry with plenty of niches which Stripe clearly fits, but it's also a very boring industry. I get surprised seeing this heavily promoted on a site I use for opinion and news.

revelation 11y ago

Uh, frankly, all you are offering is yet another credit card gateway. There are large countries out there where credit card usage is much much lower compared to debit cards. So it's cool you're translating stuff, but none of it matters if customers can't pay. It's 2015, you need PayPal level of compatibility.

jeff18 11y ago
You mean Stripe should add things like this? https://stripe.com/alipay https://stripe.com/alipay

_kyran 11y ago

I'm a huge fan of Stripe and the benefits of using it, although I've had close to 40% of all international customers receive a 'your card was declined error'. I've had to ask them to call up their bank/card provider and request for the restriction to be removed. Is Stripe's ease of onboarding/getting started causing such a high rate of flagged transactions? What's going on behind the scenes between banks and payment services providers and is this something that could be improved in the future?

Chris_Newton 11y ago
I’m sorry to read of your problem, but also glad to know it’s not just us. The last time I checked, we were losing more subscribers to mysterious international card failures on Stripe than all other causes (including deliberate cancellations) put together, but I’m talking about a small side business here so I wondered whether we’d just been an unfortunate statistical anomaly. I did contact Stripe support a while ago to ask about this, but they didn’t seem to know any more than we did and weren’t able to do anything to improve the situation. The best theory we have so far is that given how many of the transactions fail in the second month of a subscription and the greater proportion of international failures compared to domestic, we’re coming in borderline on a lot of US banks’ fraud checks, perhaps because we’re abroad and charging in a different currency. Then when we don’t have the card security code after the first payment, maybe that pushes us over the line. We’re hardly a high risk business generally, though, so it would be interesting to know whether this problem is inherent to accepting international card payments or something more specific to Stripe. Naturally we’re investigating whether general improvements we could make, such as charging in local currencies or better Dunning management, would improve the success rate. However, it’s hard to make sensible decisions with so little useful data about the cause of the problem, particularly for a business with limited development resources available that we’d rather spend on developing the service itself. In the meantime, I read these anecdotes on HN about businesses aiming for at least 95 or 98 percent retention month-to-month and dream...