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How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
- eggbrain 9y agoIf you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of code.
- michaelthiessen 9y agoThanks for un-click-baiting this.
- rpod 9y agoThanks. There's a misleading headline if I ever saw one
- forkLding 9y agoI'm thinking for the layman who doesnt code which Bloomberg also targets, this distinction is pretty negligible so in a way its not totally clickbait because its still seven lines of code, for developers it seems to be the code you write whereas the title could go anyway Also really appreciate Stripe, registered for Delaware with them
- saurik 9y agoTo the layman, I imagine this reads as either "they spent a few minutes writing one paragraph and made $9B" or "they agonized for years over something as small as a single paragraph that was worth $9B"; neither of these are reasonable interpretations. It is only to the advanced technical reader that I think there is any hope of them interpreting it in the correct manner.
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- adam12 9y agoI think it would be even more misleading for a layperson.
- tajen 9y agoIt participates to negating the difficulty of building and delivering a product, thereby giving said laymen a sense of entitlement over "undeserved wealth".
- Kluny 9y agoTo expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) <form action="/your-server-side-code" method="POST"> <script src="https://checkout.stripe.com/checkout.js" class="stripe-button" data-key="pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh" data-amount="999" data-name="Stripe.com" data-description="Widget" data-image="https://stripe.com/img/documentation/checkout/marketplace.png" data-locale="auto" data-zip-code="true"> </script> </form> - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.
- shimon_e 9y agoThe PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- artur_makly 9y agoAnother great reminder to all you founders - don't underestimate the power of great product design.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoAnd don't underestimate the power of new and... different. Many founders pass on markets they think have no room for innovation or new entrants, only to leap into some small marketless crevice.
- ckinnan 9y agoNope. The Stripe advantage over PayPal is that Stripe operates more like a merchant account, where the buyer sees the seller's name on the credit card statement. PayPal injects itself into the checkout process, Stripe is basically a white label. Stripe also has easier underwriting. I suspect Stripe is taking more business from merchant accounts/gateways than PayPal, because they are different markets.
- dschiffner 9y agoI hate click-bait headlines as much as anyone else... but nowhere in this headline does it say that they started with 7 lines of code.
- tedunangst 9y agoThe typical interpretation of "turned 7 X into Y" isn't "7 X plus another million X turned into Y". Last night I turned a pat of butter into a steak dinner. Never mind I also started with a steak, thats an irrelevant detail.
- quickthrower2 9y agoJesus turned water into wine. But really he had a bottle of Pinot to start with.
- mmahemoff 9y agoSo it's the equivalent of saying "How this inventor made $X billion with the flick of a switch" after they spent decades inventing the light bulb.
- johndavidback 9y agoIt was a bit interesting to see, and perhaps not at all surprising, that they've been around since 2010. And they crossed the billion-dollar-valuation threshold 4 years later.
- failrate 9y agoMore like how turning on lights is easy for billions of people because someone else did the hard work of the power lines, generators, switches, light bulbs, etc.
- failrate 9y agoActually, it would be more like all of that stuff already existed, but it was a woeful and Byzantine process to get all of it lined up for your particular lightbulb.
- riazrizvi 9y agoContrary to some of the other commenters I think figuring how the title is true is an interesting game. It's the type of clickbait I don't mind.
- wang_li 9y ago"How two brothers from Ireland raised prices and added friction to the flow of money."
- TotallyHuman 9y agoLooking forward to a proper cryptocurrency that will eliminate all middle-men!
- tracker1 9y agoThere's a few misconceptions in the article beyond that. and the more modern bits are written by banks, credit card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are exactly winning hackathons for elegant coding. Hackathon code is never elegant... it's always piecemeal at the end in order to get it "done."
- smsm42 9y agoI suspect whoever wrote that sentence has an extremely vague idea of what a hackathon is ("some coding contest??").
- hobofan 9y agoWhich is already a better picture than what most people have when I tell them I attended a hackathon: "So you all get together to try and hack the security system of a company?"
- smsm42 9y agoSurprisingly, that description may be exactly true if you understand the word "hack" just right :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adam12 9y agoThe only reason why I started to read the article. I guess that's why they call it clickbait.
- free2rhyme214 9y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking. The API is definitely more than 7 lines of code.
- WheelsAtLarge 9y agoIt is misleading. It deemphasizes what can be learned from the article. What helped this company get traction was ease of use, the 7 lines of code made it easy to use, and also, that the reason this company even got off the ground is the 2 brothers and their focus on getting the company to where it is. It seems to me that whatever they would have chosen to do would have had some success. Again, it highlights the point that it's not the idea, they're a dime a dozen, it's the people that implement the idea.
- kbenson 9y agoI don't think it's misleading, it's just that there are different preconceptions based on the audience. If there was an article about "How two brothers turned a 3 oz piece of metal into a billion dollar startup" and it was a highly machined part that fit a really useful case in the auto industry, we would rightly assume they were talking about what they sold, and that a lot more work went into actually making and perfecting it. If the same article was read by machinists, they might take issue with it like people are taking issue with this headline, but that's because of the context they are perceiving it in.
- codazoda 9y agoI feel like I just wasted 15 minutes digging for that and being disappointed that their MVP wasn't a 7-liner. Guess I should have come to the comments first.
- adventist 9y agoThat is what i do :)
- sidcool 9y agoI would guess hacker news audience would know it.
- A1phab3t 9y agoIt's infuriating. Ok, 7 lines of code that form the tip of an iceberg of thousands of lines of code fronting months of contract and negotiation work. WTF.
- mschaef 9y ago~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThat's really interesting. How did you know that?
- pkilgore 9y agoThe article: "Surely the smartest redhead in Ireland,” read one headline about 16-year-old Patrick being named Young Scientist of the Year for developing a programming language and artificial intelligence system."
- defen 9y agoAre "redheads in Ireland" stereotyped as being particularly smarter or stupider than other Irish? That's the only way I can make sense of that headline - it makes as much sense to me as "the smartest black-haired person in Ireland"
- s_dev 9y agoNo -- "smartest red head in Ireland" just an arbitrary qualifier and a throwaway comment -- if anything it just emphasizes the number of red heads in Ireland.
- barking 9y ago10% of Irish people are redheads while about a half carry the gene apparently. I'd be willing to bet the dark haired brother has forearms covered in freckles
- Symbiote 9y ago
- Kiro 9y agoThe biggest thing for me with Stripe was that I no longer needed a card redemption agreement. Before that I had to deal with both my bank and the provider and it was a bureaucratic mess. I still wonder how Stripe managed to get around that.
- cperciva 9y agoThere is an analogous agreement, but it's hidden behind 'terms and conditions' which you click through without reading.
- crazypyro 9y agoIsn't part of the innovation the fact that almost all users can click through that part of the process instead of spending lots of time in bureaucracy? Is there justification for everyone who wants to process payments needing to understand that type of legal document? Is there some major liability that people are agreeing to when they accept the T&Cs? I honestly just don't know anything about card redemption agreements and google wasn't very helpful.
- Silhouette 9y agoIs there some major liability that people are agreeing to when they accept the T&Cs? The agreements between payment services and merchants are some of the most one-sided legal contracts you are ever likely to encounter. Unless you are a huge merchant, they are probably non-negotiable. Typically they grant the payment service and/or its associates the authority to literally take money straight out of your bank account, impose often unspecified levels of fees for vaguely defined transgressions, etc. They will also typically make the merchant responsible for almost anything that goes wrong in terms of fraud, other than perhaps a few specific exceptions where facilities like 3-D Secure were used. Stripe seems to be little better than anyone else with much of this, though as I understand it that is partly because the card networks impose their own terms and intermediary services like Stripe are essentially just passing them on without having much say about it themselves either. To give credit where it's due, I've never personally encountered Stripe actually abusing those sorts of terms, and getting signed up with them in the first place was dramatically easier than the alternatives available at the time other than possibly entry-level PayPal (+ accompanying horror stories, depending on who you ask).
- willlll 9y ago> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal—which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website—but it could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume. So, reading into this, amazon presumably invested in stripe, then gave it some transaction traffic to juice the numbers to make an S-1 look better?
- omarchowdhury 9y agoThis is quite interesting. What does Amazon have to gain from using Stripe?
- Nilef 9y agoAmazon's overall goal is to take a cut of pretty much every piece of economic activity. Taking a cut off of every payment made on the internet outside of their own stores is an objective greatly aided by a stripe acquisition
- th0raway 9y agoYou have to look at it from both sides though: If I started a business with Stripe as a processor, it's in Stripe's best interest for my business to grow as much as possible, because the higher my volume, the more they make. They'll want a good cut, but their goal is a long term relationship. It's not the same thing with Amazon: Every piece of intel I give them is an opportunity for them to eat my business. I guess that if Amazon threw a crazy enough amount of money at them, then sure, everyone has a price, but how is joining Bezos' empire helping them? There's very little synergy in the other direction, so the premium for such an acquisition would have to be very large. When you put the premium there, along with how being acquired by Amazon makes the competition more attractive, makes me think that something like that is unlikely.
- tommynicholas 9y agoInternational or some other payment type Amazon doesn't support well or at all in their own payment system seems like the lowest hanging fruit. Amazon payments seemed like a huge opportunity to me at one point but I think they're sort of moving away from it. This could be a test that could trigger moving all payments to Stripe and eliminating the overhead of their own payments team. Wouldn't shock me.
- cylinder 9y agoAnyone who dealt with Authorize.net should have seen the opportunity in making these payments simpler... But I didn't.
- jmtame 9y agoI vividly remember how difficult it was. You had to print pages off and fill out all this stuff and mail it to someone.
- edpichler 9y ago"How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code into a $9.2B Startup" This is how NOT to do headlines.
- heyrhett 9y ago"That figure has roughly doubled in the past five years" So, 14 lines of code?
- fpgaminer 9y agoI hadn't worked with payment systems for a number of years, but recently added Stripe to a quick MVP I built (bitcoinvoice.com). It took two hours. I couldn't believe how easy it was, and how nice the UX of the whole thing was. I imagined the usual song and dance of writing a bunch of back-end code to handle all their weird requests, worrying about double checking everything in the requests to make sure nobody can spoof them, etc, etc. Ya know, the dumb stuff that takes hours to write, hours to test, and days to wait for support to get back to you because their test servers are broken. And then I imagined waiting days for them to approve my account for live transactions, requiring scanned copies of my driver's license with me flashing some sort of gang sign while reciting page 452 of the 1993 re-print of Moby Dick. Nope. Turned out they have a synchronous API for processing payment so I don't need to handle callbacks on the backend. Turned out the front end code was, yeah about 7 lines (more with a few tweaks). And their documentation injects your keys into the sample code for you (wow)! On top of all that ... they had Go sample code! And when I went to enable my live account, I'm pretty sure all they asked for was name and address, maybe TIN. Nothing else. No wait. Just ... bam, I was enabled and could start accepting live payments. It was perhaps the most pleasant API integration I've ever done. There are _some_ rough spots. They don't really explain Radar, their fraud protection very well. It wasn't clear to me if it was automatically included and handled. shrugs. And though they advertised support for Bitcoin payments, it turns out you have to use their async API to accept Bitcoin payments. I was willing to accept zero-conf payments, so I figured I could just keep using their synchronous API, but I guess not.
- jajern 9y agoI had pretty much the same experience. I programmed an API to talk to a payment gateway connected to a chase merchant account some years ago. It was not fun. When I setup Stripe I was confused when it was done and there weren't 25 more steps before it works.
- whipoodle 9y agoThe bit about Amazon is the actual news contained in the story, if anyone here is interested in discussing that.
- strictnein 9y agoYeah, this is really, really interesting: > Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon. com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Lots of questions about why Amazon would do something like that. Is it so they have a backup in case their systems go down? Or was Stripe actually able to get better rates than Amazon was, so this will save them money?
- pas 9y agoAmazon needs data to know where to expand, how to price things. Stripe has a lot of exactly that. Maybe...
- bb611 9y agoI setup my brother's small business stripe integration, and I wrote and tested the API calls to charge customers. Stripe doesn't know anything about his business except transaction sizes, and a bunch of info they definitely can't resell (TIN) or is already public knowledge (business name, billing address). I doubt they have anything helpful for pricing, though they might be able to analyze gross transaction rates and geography. I have never checked what their contractual obligations are with that data, I imagine if they started sharing it that would get out pretty fast, and result in them losing customers rapidly.
- dawson 9y agoI suspect Amazon will, if this isn't already part of that discussion and or negotiation, acquire Stripe.
- wumbolad 9y ago
- smaili 9y agoThough not the primary focus of the article, this struck a chord with me: > When bored in class, Patrick read books. “I would line up the angles so I was hidden from the teacher’s view,” he says, adding that he found out years later that an enlightened principal had instructed teachers to allow it.
- nouveau0 9y agoHow Two Brothers Fought Against All Odds And Things As Such As That: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9k5SWwE38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9k5SWwE38
- droidist2 9y agoI need to finally watch this show!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jaggajasoos33 9y agoClickbait title but I get the point. They simplified something that otherwise just too complex.
- downandout 9y agoI don't know Patrick, but he has personally jumped in here on HN where appropriate, publicly given out his own email address to handle issues, etc., and continued to do so even after Stripe achieved a $1b+ valuation. While most of their billionaire Silicon Valley contemporaries are very hard people to root for, I am rooting for these guys. They seem like genuinely good people whose success is well deserved, and so far they have not let it go to their heads.
- hluska 9y agoI agree on every single point. I've been amazed reading threads on here where Patrick jumps in and offers his help. I've never met them, but Patrick and John seem like wonderful people. I'll always root for them!
- pieterhg 9y agoPatrick is awesome! He asked me to have lunch after I tweeted feature suggestions about Stripe. Indeed, which founder of a billion dollar company does that (or has time for that)? Another time, I had trouble getting the Stripe code to work and Stripe's former CTO Greg Brockman debugged my PHP code (!) to fix it for me. I'm not making this up. The CEO wants to have lunch with me (a nobody) and the CTO debugs my code. It's one of the few VC-backed companies I really root for. Stripe has a great product, great service, solid business model (it can't get more simple than % on transactions really), great engineering (their USP is/was their API) and it seems they really support small and medium business owners (and bootstrappers especially). My only hope is anyone who will acquire them (and I think this will happen soon) keeps the product at this level.
- skrebbel 9y ago> me (a nobody) Well, you're got quite the Twitter following, probably nearly entirely in Stripe's target demographic :-) But yeah, that is cool.
- jacquesm 9y agoMy hope is they will not be acquired and will keep this stand-alone as a true alternative rather than be eaten and then to lose all their advantages. Acquisitions of companies like this usually spell the end of the line. Here's to hoping Stripe will IPO and will go on to acquire who could now potentially acquire them.
- IgorPartola 9y agoFor me, Stripe was a revelation because they eliminated fixed monthly costs. When I ran a side project that took credit cards, I found the cheapest option to be a $20/month merchant account + $20/month to Spreedly. Others had a few months free trials, etc. but ended up being more expensive over the first year. Stripe, while being more expensive than these options per transaction, actually cost me a lot less to start out. While $40/month doesn't seem like a lot, for a hobby project that likely won't make that much money in the first months to a year, it's huge.
- robinjfisher 9y agoSo much this. When I started Leavetrack[1] in 2011, it was so difficult to get setup for recurring payments. I was using Chargify to handle the recurring payments/credit card storage, a company in New Zealand (I am in the UK) to handle the interface to my merchant account in the UK. Total costs: - c. US$40 per month for Chargify (which kept increasing) - £20 per month for the payment gateway - £25 per month + transaction fee for merchant account So happy when Stripe landed in the UK and I could migrate to a flat fee per transaction which scaled with me. Migrating is hard as you need customers to re-enter card details but an offer of reducing their monthly subscription due to savings in processing costs helped that process. :) [1] https://leavetrackapp.com/ https://leavetrackapp.com/
- IgorPartola 9y agoRe: migrating customers: I just grandfathered all paying customers to a perpetual free plan. Weren't that many of them. Sadly that app never gained traction. You'd think reliable up/down monitoring of unlimited servers at $4/month would be a good deal.
- hamandcheese 9y agoMaybe you weren't charging enough?
- IgorPartola 9y ago
- wonderwonder 9y agoThe article mentions this but for me the truly great aspect of stripe is that they targeted the developer. I have dealt with several payment systems and most of them have poor documentation and getting them to work is a lot of trial and error. They appear to be monoliths who survive because management has chosen them. Stripe provides excellent documentation and support (on #stripe in freenode). It just makes my life easier. (I have never used Braintree so I can't comment on it)
- mbrock 9y agoOMG, support on IRC? That's so legit.
- BigChiefSmokem 9y agoI love this. Simplicity and speed is what I fight for everyday at work but it seems I am the odd man out in my field. Everyone just wants to write over-engineered solutions that can launch space rockets with extra extra modularization you know just in case the Hubble fails again and of course fear of what may happen "in the future" in case "we ever need to scale". How about we just focus on the job at hand for now and worry about things like scaling and robust API/interfaces AFTER we actually acquire customers and start making the money.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThis headline really cheapens their accomplishments. It's not enough to start a successful business with a lot of work but it has to be just seven lines of code or over the weekend.
- balls187 9y agoSeems all kinds of shitty to have an article about "Two brothers" yet feature a photo where only one brother is in focus.
- skrebbel 9y agoI guess Patrick is the singer, John is the drummer.
- vuyani 9y agoI opened the site and thought "oh, I didn't know scump is also a coder" :D
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- basdevries 9y agoTo add a bit of insight: most Payment-Service-Providers actually pay big retailers to be listed on their site, as it improves trustworthiness and brand awareness. So the Amazon deal might not be as favorable to Stripe as it might sound.
- jv22222 9y agoWe interviewed Patrick on TechZing back in 2012. Great guy. http://techzinglive.com/page/939/168-tz-interview-patrick-collison-stripe http://techzinglive.com/page/939/168-tz-interview-patrick-co...
- rdiddly 9y ago"There’s such an improbability to their story -— that these brothers from a little village would come to build what could well be one of the most important companies on the internet.” But is it, in fact, improbable? If you believe Paul Graham, the most revolutionary ideas are always going to come from off the beaten path -- from some backwater, either of geography and/or of ideas.
- Lordarminius 9y ago“They have the advantage of coming to California without being tainted and polluted by what’s in the water supply and air of Silicon Valley,” That made me laugh. But you are right: to create something really new, you must bring in a different perspective. Frequently, this is possible only as an outsider.
- abalone 9y ago> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Take this with a large, disclosed portion of salt. Amazon is big enough to pay essentially nothing in processor markup. Not to mention they sell their own payments service. If Stripe is actually handling any Amazon processing they are making no money on it, and quite possibly taking a loss to buy the volume. Think Square's deal with Starbucks. They ended up losing $56M.[1] [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/square-ipo-filing-shows-starbucks-deal-was-a-bust/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/square-ipo-filing-shows-starbu...
- whipoodle 9y agoSince, as you point out, they're probably not making money on the processing directly, maybe there is another reason Stripe would find it useful to process a large amount of transactions...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amichal 9y agoI am just now in the process of completing a migration from Paypal PayFlow (Recurring Profiles) to Stripe (Subscriptions) While Stripe's API documentation is MUCH easier to understand on the face there is a lot of undocumented complexity hidden away in there that was documented in Payflow Pro (mostly -- in a hard to find 400 page pdf). In the end it is worth it for our specific use case. But like anything involving money over time it is much harder then it seems. Obviously, WAY more then "7 lines of code" to do it even halfway right. I have to give massive credit to both organizations support engineers who helped us move the card details across without us ever seeing them. In the end they even ended up having to do a complex customer_id mapping for us to get it done in a way that allowed us to recreate the behaviour we had in PayFlow in Subscriptions
- edwinwee 9y agoI'd love to hear more about the complexity you ran into to see if we can make it easier. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
- amichal 9y agoThe complexity was more in our customers application logic then in Stripe. Stripe understandably enforces quite a few sensible limits that 'normal' usage probably wouldn't hit. For us the 2 biggies were: * There is a (undocumented?) limit of 25 subscriptions per customer. Our client sells a la carte services and some large customers have quite a bit more then 25 things. Subscription items partially solve this EXCEPT everything in a subscription must bill on the same-cycle and... * Our client had a requirement to maintain the existing billing cycles for all customers (and enforce specific start dates for new subscription). These two limits meant we had to bundle existing services into Subscriptions during the migration and use the "trial period" feature (as a "start_date") to force the billing cycle for each bundle. The worst case customer had I believe 18 different billing cycles for their services in the end so we got lucky. (we also had to figure out a way to name the bundles in the UI and the CC statement descriptor etc). In the end this saves on transaction fees and reduces the clutter on their CC statements but cost quite a bit of development effort to do and makes the code managing "subscription" starts and stops a bit complex.
- samblr 9y ago>>>> "Stripe made its debut in 2011 .... had spent two years testing their service and forming relationships with banks, credit card companies, and regulators so customers wouldn’t have to". Can somebody help throw light on: how Paypal was lagging in 2011 when compared to stripe ? -OR- how Collisons went forming better relationship with bank to build a system better than Paypal ?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tommynicholas 9y agoPaypal's white label product was unusable (literally for some companies). Their banking relationships did not need to be better than Paypal's to have a better white labeled, developer centric payments gateway than Paypal.
- AdieuToLogic 9y agoStripe is an ISO with First Data Merchant Services (FDMS, I believe now owned or controlled by Wells Fargo) doing the actual processing and, as such, assumes a different legal role than PayPal (which is a VAR for Paymentech). The "two years testing their service" part is longer than a lot of ISO certifications, but that all depends. Ultimately, though, it's a lot easier to be certified as a VAR due to the fact that the processor (a bank usually, though can be an ISO) assumes more responsibility (risk/liability) in the relationship. Regarding "forming better relationship with bank [sic]", it's not so much that one is has a better relationship than the other as it is their relationships are fundamentally different.
- michaeloblak 9y agoIs there any service that will handle the backend of the Stripe integration for me? I'm talking about simple charging per product, ex. selling ebooks. Or Squarespace like websites are the only solution here?
- edwinwee 9y agoYou might want to look into Upwork,[0] PeoplePerHour,[1] or Airpair.[2] There are also some great third-party e-commerce integrations that are pretty simple to set up: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/ecommerce https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/ecommerce Shoot me an email at edwin@stripe.com and I'd be happy to help you get started. [0] https://www.upwork.com/hire/stripe-freelancers/ https://www.upwork.com/hire/stripe-freelancers/ [1] https://www.peopleperhour.com/ https://www.peopleperhour.com/ [2] https://www.airpair.com/ https://www.airpair.com/
- suhith 9y ago"“I would line up the angles so I was hidden from the teacher’s view,” he says, adding that he found out years later that an enlightened principal had instructed teachers to allow it. " This is very cool, kudos to the principal.
- sumedh 9y ago> forming relationships with banks So can you just call up the relevant department in the bank and start talking or do you need to know someone who knows someone in the bank.
- bigtunacan 9y agoMy comment/question isn't about Stripe per se, but rather the surcharges of payment processors in general. It seems like 2.9% + .50 is about average, but then I see a site like https://sendmoneytoschool.com/ https://sendmoneytoschool.com/ and they are charging a $1.00 processing fee for credit card payments to put lunch money in my kids' school account. Is there some way to get super low processing fees if you don't use something like Stripe? Or are they taking money from the school and the parents? I'm just wondering how low of a rate is is possible to get for your ecommerce credit card payments?
- Artemis2 9y agoIt depends a lot on the card type, the location, the volume of the business and it’s risk profile, but eventually can get to a pricing scheme called interchange+, which is a fixed fee (generally <15¢) on top of the cost to process cards for your provider (so fee from the issuing bank + network fee). In the US this varies a LOT depending on the card type, but most consumer cards are approx 1% interchange + a small fixed fee. In Europe these interchange rates are regulated at 0,3% for consumer cards. There are cases of special schemes (eg. CB in France) where processing can be even cheaper.
- bigtunacan 9y agoThanks. I wasn't familiar with this. That's definitely significantly cheaper (transaction cost wise at least), but even then doesn't leave enough room to profit on the transaction fee alone so I'm assuming they must be charging the schools for the service and partially subsidizing with the convenience fees.
- pankajkumar229 9y agoHow does stripe compare to Braintree?
- amelius 9y agoThis is another example where a company did not do much out of the ordinary, but in hindsight, it appears as if they did.
- tzs 9y agoHow well does Stripe handle expired cards? The payment gateway we use now allows sending an expiration date of 0000 on submissions that are marked as being a recurring or installment payment. This attempts the transaction without doing an expiration date check [1]. Stripe's documentation says that they automatically use the credit card update services of Visa, MC, and Discover to update expiration dates of cards they are storing, so that you don't have to worry about keeping the expiration date up to date. However, from what I've seen using the Visa and MC updater services, a significant fraction of issuing banks do not support them and when requesting updated information on those cards nothing comes back, and these cards often still actually work fine. Does Stripe having something equivalent to 0000, so that one can say "try to charge this recurring payment on this card, even if we do not have the current expiration date and the updater service did not give a response"? [1] The expiration date on a credit card is the date that the card itself expires, not the date that the account expires. For new orders, online or in-person, an expired card should be a red flag because a person actually placing a live order should have their latest card. Seeing an expired card live could mean it is a stolen card.
- kodir 9y agoDear Stripe team! I am trying to activate my Stripe account but after I press the "Activate Account" button, keep getting "An unknown error occurred" message. Wrote about this in the "Feedback" form, but haven't heard back. Please help.
- edwinwee 9y agoWeird, sorry about that. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into this?
- Leigho_11 9y agoThe article is inspiring at first glance but could cause a new programmer to overlook effort and possible expenses associated with building such a website. For instance, if the programmer has either front- end or back- end programming skills but not both they will need to hire someone to build half of the program. Still, lacking one or both skills they would need to have an engineer or coder available to manage any potential bugs in the program and field user requests.