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The 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.
by shimon_e 9y ago
The 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.
- anonacct37 9y agoAs someone that selected stripe to process orders for a product were were launching somewhere around 2012, it was because of the APIs and developer sandbox. Paypal was ugly to work with, felt crufty, etc. Stripe had pip installable modules, awesome documentation (live code samples in docs and sandbox), and was easy to integrate into our tests.
- jacquesm 9y agoAnd most importantly: Stripe does not randomly decide your funds are suddenly theirs for the next 6 months to a year.
- jameskegel 9y agoThis is how PayPal lost my business initially; now that I'm a part of the payments industry, I use PayPal sparingly for much else.
- hwillis 9y agoThat's the least of it. Paypal automatically puts you on a 21-60 day rolling reserve once you hit a certain level. Small businesses can and have had 30%+ of their revenue unavailable for two months. That's your entire profit margin gone. It makes it impossible to grow a small business. And of course they will not respond to anything for months if ever. And it never gets better! Companies with millions in revenue still get these problems. Paypal has no place being used by anyone trying to start a company. They are awful.
- ErikAugust 9y agoBefore Stripe - I had to take a loan out, and make the switch to Authorize.net so I could get my company off PayPal and its 60 day reserve - otherwise it would have folded. They were perpetually holding tens of thousands of dollars at all times.
- lmm 9y agoThey'll do that sooner or later. Everyone in the money-handling industry has to randomly lock-up funds and not tell you why, because that's what anti-money-laundering laws require.
- simonh 9y agoOk, but there's a difference between doing that because you are required to by law, and doing it because you've chosen to adopt appalling business practices.
- Alupis 9y ago> 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. You're talking about PayPal Express, which is the PayPal form most of us are familiar with. PayPal has a number of other services, such as Payments Pro, and PayFlow, which act just like a Credit Card Processor, ie. the customer has no idea it's PayPal on the backend - they enter their credit card info on your checkout form like normal and click submit. The customer's bank statement will state your company name, not PayPal. Majority (all?) of the PayPal horror stories you hear are from folks using PayPal Express with large amounts of money coming from weird places. Payments Pro really is a different class of service, complete with your own representative you can call up 24 hours a day. You can also setup a nightly automated sweep of any funds to your real bank account.
- TotallyHuman 9y agoBut why would anyone use a shitty company over a good one, no matter the service levels?
- icebraining 9y agoBecause you may live in a dark patch: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global EDIT: Nevermind: "Currently, PayPal Payments Pro is available in the US, UK, and Canada."
- pbreit 9y agoQuestion is when will Stripe (or someone else) operate even =more= like a merchant account (ie, interchange+ pricing).
- BillinghamJ 9y agoThey already do. You just need high enough volume.
- bdibs 9y agoDon't forget about their fantastic API and documentation.
- AdieuToLogic 9y agoThe Stripe advantage over PayPal is that Stripe operates more like a merchant account ... Stripe 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). This is how Stripe is, as you say, "basically a white label."
- jonknee 9y agoThe PayPal form also involved redirecting all your users over to PayPal. Stripe has always integrated into your site/service which is part of what made that form so nifty.
- sumedh 9y ago> The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI. Paypal's documentation and the sandbox process is so atrocious that I had to question my own intelligence. Turns out the problem was with paypal and not my IQ.
- foxylad 9y agoWe moved from PayPal to Stripe. Yes, integration was much easier, because of the simple and effective API and great documentation (good examples with your own data included - brilliant!). But we switched because PayPal just did not work. A significant percentage of card transactions failed for absolutely no reason, despite "good" customers (school teachers from first world countries), no chargebacks and no fraud. Cards would routinely magically work the next day, and in the end we came to believe PayPal arbitrarily failed card transactions to force people to set up PayPal accounts. Moving to Stripe resolved this overnight. We'll never go back.
- kennydude 9y agoActually processing the response is significantly easier with Stripe. Before Stripe, PayPal was some clunky API with a endless amount of different accounts with different pricing structures.