5 ms·

Kicking off Stripe’s private beta in India

126 points by rahulshiv 9y ago

dhruvrrp 9y ago
What's the credit/debit card penetration like in India? I recall most transactions happening in cash when i visited a few years ago. Which also led to amazon and flipkart offering cash on delivery payment methods. Did something change in relation to that? coz if not then stripe is gonna have a hard time finding customers
- iamgopal 9y ago
  Digital wallet is the new thing.
- derefr 9y ago
  > Did something change in relation to that? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonet...
- virtuabhi 9y ago
  Yes, last year's demonetization changed it all. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/12/14/inside-indias-cashless-revolution/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/12/14/inside-i...
- simonk 9y ago
  Others have pointed it out that it may but its also for Indian startups being able to easily accept payments internationally without setting up a US company.
- subbu 9y ago
  When I started accepting online payments for simplyguest.com the percentage was less than 50%. Customers preferred to pay cash, but cash is difficult to manage, so I started pushing towards online payments. My cash collection this month was less than 2%. I am trying to avoid this as well. As businesses realize cash is not easy to scale, and if they are ambitious enough, they will push their customers towards credit/debit cards and other scalable channels.
git-pull 9y ago
By the way, stripe has a cool new project, "stripe-mock": https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock It lets you run a local stripe API on your machine. I've got high hopes in it. This could be the cure to building resilient stripe tests on local machines. The maintainer @brandur seems to know his stuff in regards to rest apis.
- lawrencewu 9y ago
  Oh god, thanks so much for this. I've literally just been testing on prod and praying that it works.
  - bballer 9y ago
    You know you can generate a API test token and use one of test card numbers for all your testing purposes. There is a toggle in your main dashboard which will let you switch between sandbox/test mode and production for viewing charges etc.
    - diggan 9y ago
      This assumes you have internet connection always when developing/running tests, which is not always the case. I always to rely on local tools/endpoints so when I'm offline, I can still continue working. Don't use Stripe as much as before but I definitely I wished I had this mock when implementing Stripe in applications I worked on.
- frakkingcylons 9y ago
  Also is pretty active on his (very good, IMO) technical blog: https://brandur.org/articles https://brandur.org/articles
blocked_again 9y ago
It would be interesting to watch Stripe competing with the Razorpay which started as the Stripe of India. Both are funded by YC.
- adtac 9y ago
  Wait, YC would fund a startup that's a competitor to one of its other startups? Huh, this is news for me (and it opens up the possibility of me applying to YC; previously I was apprehensive because YC had funded a direct competitor ~10 years ago).
  - agordhandas 9y ago
    I think YC funds competitors often (not sure how often). For example, Amplitude and Mixpanel are both YC companies. https://www.quora.com/Would-Y-Combinator-invest-in-a-company-that-directly-competes-with-one-of-its-portfolio-companies https://www.quora.com/Would-Y-Combinator-invest-in-a-company...
  - SingAlong 9y ago
    RazorPay is India-focused and started a few years ago. Until they came around, there were few (zero?) payment gateways that fulfilled all the following criteria: * Clean API * Support India-focused payment options (netbanking is huge here. And Razorpay also supports digital-wallets) * Easy to get started fast with less paperwork For every other payment gateway, you had to go through a papertrail before you could even tryout the sandbox API. I remember Razorpay (initially atleast) required only PAN and allowed individuals to start accepting payments. This IMHO is huge indie-friendly. And back then, for every payment gateway you had to be a registered company. Not sure if that relaxed rule translated to an uptick in growth.
kartickv 9y ago
As someone who doesn't know Stripe well, because it hasn't been available in India, is it just a payment gateway, allowing me to put a Buy button in my site or app to charge someone's credit card, debit card, net banking or Paytm?
- Operyl 9y ago
  Payment processor, so “buy button on site/app/etc”
ktta 9y ago
>In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users This is the statistic that will change the world more than a little bit. This is partly because the richest man in India has spent $25bn on telecom infrastructure and acquisition of new customers. Here's a related article - https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-new-customers-cost-cool-25bn-acquire-mukesh-ambani-has-made-business-worlds https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-n...
nocoder 9y ago
This is going to be tough. The competition in payment ecosystem is pretty hot in India. You have Alibaba funded paytm with about 250 million users. They provide digital wallet services which can be used for buying anything from flights tickets to electronics online or paying for Uber. Apart from that they are also present offline, you can but grocery or even tea with that. Additionally they also have payments bank licence so you can have your bank account there itself. Then there is Jio money funded by India s richest man which also operates in telecom and has roughly 100 million users, they also have a payments bank licence. Finally there is Amazon pay, which is moving slowly but has recently tied up with lot of websites for movies or online food delivery. So the competition is likely to be fierce.
- subbu 9y ago
  YC has funded 2 Indian startups in this space: Razorpay, and Cashfree, and now Stripe has also entered the space. Along with the startups some big banks are also in the fray. I started with HDFC payments for my company's payments but moved away from them; they expect you to work at their pace. That'd have killed us by now. I wrote about my payment experiences here: https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-payments.html https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-payments.h...
  - sharmi 9y ago
    Hi Subbu, The canonical url for your page is set to http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-payments.html http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-payments.html . That is not the best option for SEO :)
    - subbu 9y ago
      Thank you, Sharmi. I really appreciate you taking out time to look at the source and point out the issue. I have fixed the canonical url. I also noticed the feed url was wrong too. I have fixed that as well :)
- arjunbajaj 9y ago
  None of those support payments from customers outside India, a requirement most online businesses have.
pvsukale3 9y ago
Razorpay (funded by YC) is a competitor to Stripe in India. Has anyone tried using it? How was your experience?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sunilkumarc 9y ago
  A couple of months back I wanted to try Razorpay for receiving payments from my app users. Just like donate button in PayPal. But Razorpay was not supporting independent developers at that time. While Stripe supports this feature beautifully, it wasn't supporting in India. Now I'm excited to hear this news.
adtac 9y ago
Oh god yes, thank you! I've wanted this for so long. I'm building a SaaS and I seriously considered paying $500 for Stripe Atlas to incorporate in the US just for Stripe. (I don't expect my crowd to be from any particular country, so a global payments vendor is the best option.) The state of payments here is sub-par; while providers are still coming up, the documentation is just not sufficient (at least not up to Stripe's standards), the APIs are a bit convoluted, and the whole thing feels shaky. Plus, Stripe is trusted by customers, so I bet at least a few of them would be more comfortable if they see the familiar Stripe payment form.
- superasn 9y ago
  I agree with you. The timing couldn't be better and I've tried most of the other payment processors but I didn't find them usable at all. Waiting eagerly to get my invite and hope this isn't some crippled version due to RBI regulations.
superasn 9y ago
Is the Indian Stripe account same in functionality as the US account? Or is it restricted in some way due to the strict RBI rules in India?
- shripadk 9y ago
  Hopefully without restrictions! Fingers crossed! If it's going to be restricted in some major way, then there won't be any difference between Stripe and say PayPal which makes it a non-starter. RBI really needs to loosen up a bit, especially when it comes to over-regulation of the Software sector.
- adtac 9y ago
  Yeah, this is the real question. I really hope this will have feature parity. At least the basic things like recurring payments in foreign currencies and stuff like that.
- sukh 9y ago
  We run a single product web store in India that has modest monthly transaction volume and care about the user experience a lot. All processors are required to do 3D Secure verification. Local processors have integration for NetBanking. International ones are card only but may have better developer experience. Apple Pay uses 3D Secure too but bypasses two-factor verfication by tokenization. Reliability/sucess rate is no longer as big of a deal with most competent processors. We've found the need to build custom tooling and abuse data more important for the Indian ecosystem.
akhatri_aus 9y ago
Can you do subscriptions, how does it work with the compulsory 3D secure rules?
temp9910 9y ago
I have really high hopes from this. There is currently no good way for a SaaS startup in India to get money from international customers. I think this is why many are forced to incorporate in the US/Singapore/etc. I am a single founder working on a SaaS project and receiving payments from outside India is one of the biggest challenges for me. I do not want to raise funds but may have to got that route just so that I can incorporate outside India and start receiving payments. I have three requests for Stripe: 1) I hope that Stripe does not come out with a limited version for India, and that it is possible to charge international customers a variable amount every month, like you can do in the US. 2) I also hope that they come up with a prompt way of issuing FIRCs for every payment received. Without an FIRC there is no way to prove that the transaction was an export and therefore you have to pay GST on it, which is normally 18% for services. This reason alone is pushing me to incorporate in some other country. I stand to lose thousands of dollars this year because I can't get an FIRC for the payments I receive via Paypal/Wire transfer/Transferwise. Paypal and Transferwise have procedures to get FIRCs, but when you approach their banks they either don't respond or come up with hundred reasons to not issue one. Citibank absolutely sucks at this. I really hope that Stripe just charges me whatever they want and couriers the FIRCs to my address automatically. 3) I hope that Stripe has a legal setup that is compatible with RBI regulations regarding the filling up of SOFTEX forms. There are some restrictions which in my understanding prohibit Indians from using international gateways like fastspring.
- sudhirj 9y ago
  How does paddle.com handle this? They take over as merchant of record, and so technically they're selling your SaaS and paying you royalties via a reverse invoice. Any idea if they need to or give our FIRCs?
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Are you suggesting that paddle.com gets around the RBI restrictions for companies based outside of India selling to Indians?
    - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
danieltillett 9y ago
Does this allow companies outside of India to accept payment from Indians without an international credit card?
- anilgulecha 9y ago
  Isn't that true already? My friends and I have been able to use local bank debit cards and they work as expected on international sites.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Well yes and no. The vast majority of Indian credit and debit cards don’t work outside of India. You need to get special permission from your bank to be able to use an Indian CC outside of India [0]. 0. I have to say that I have not looked into this in detail in the last 12 months so if things have changed with the RBI I would be very happy to know.
0x62 9y ago
I'm still waiting for Stripe to launch in the UK's Crown Dependencies. I'm based in Jersey, and we have no (easy) marketplace payment solution. Currently using Safecharge, which is quite good, however the setup process requires submitting 10+ documents with details on the company structure, UBOs and nature of business.
kylehotchkiss 9y ago
Will this accept RuPay?

126 points by rahulshiv 9y ago

What's the credit/debit card penetration like in India? I recall most transactions happening in cash when i visited a few years ago. Which also led to amazon and flipkart offering cash on delivery payment methods. Did something change in relation to that? coz if not then stripe is gonna have a hard time finding customers

iamgopal 9y ago
Digital wallet is the new thing.
derefr 9y ago
> Did something change in relation to that? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonet...
virtuabhi 9y ago
Yes, last year's demonetization changed it all. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/12/14/inside-indias-cashless-revolution/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/12/14/inside-i...
simonk 9y ago
Others have pointed it out that it may but its also for Indian startups being able to easily accept payments internationally without setting up a US company.
subbu 9y ago
When I started accepting online payments for simplyguest.com the percentage was less than 50%. Customers preferred to pay cash, but cash is difficult to manage, so I started pushing towards online payments. My cash collection this month was less than 2%. I am trying to avoid this as well. As businesses realize cash is not easy to scale, and if they are ambitious enough, they will push their customers towards credit/debit cards and other scalable channels.

git-pull 9y ago

By the way, stripe has a cool new project, "stripe-mock": https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock https://github.com/stripe/stripe-mock It lets you run a local stripe API on your machine. I've got high hopes in it. This could be the cure to building resilient stripe tests on local machines. The maintainer @brandur seems to know his stuff in regards to rest apis.

lawrencewu 9y ago
Oh god, thanks so much for this. I've literally just been testing on prod and praying that it works.
- bballer 9y ago
  You know you can generate a API test token and use one of test card numbers for all your testing purposes. There is a toggle in your main dashboard which will let you switch between sandbox/test mode and production for viewing charges etc.
  - diggan 9y ago
    This assumes you have internet connection always when developing/running tests, which is not always the case. I always to rely on local tools/endpoints so when I'm offline, I can still continue working. Don't use Stripe as much as before but I definitely I wished I had this mock when implementing Stripe in applications I worked on.
frakkingcylons 9y ago
Also is pretty active on his (very good, IMO) technical blog: https://brandur.org/articles https://brandur.org/articles

blocked_again 9y ago

It would be interesting to watch Stripe competing with the Razorpay which started as the Stripe of India. Both are funded by YC.

adtac 9y ago
Wait, YC would fund a startup that's a competitor to one of its other startups? Huh, this is news for me (and it opens up the possibility of me applying to YC; previously I was apprehensive because YC had funded a direct competitor ~10 years ago).
- agordhandas 9y ago
  I think YC funds competitors often (not sure how often). For example, Amplitude and Mixpanel are both YC companies. https://www.quora.com/Would-Y-Combinator-invest-in-a-company-that-directly-competes-with-one-of-its-portfolio-companies https://www.quora.com/Would-Y-Combinator-invest-in-a-company...
- SingAlong 9y ago
  RazorPay is India-focused and started a few years ago. Until they came around, there were few (zero?) payment gateways that fulfilled all the following criteria: * Clean API * Support India-focused payment options (netbanking is huge here. And Razorpay also supports digital-wallets) * Easy to get started fast with less paperwork For every other payment gateway, you had to go through a papertrail before you could even tryout the sandbox API. I remember Razorpay (initially atleast) required only PAN and allowed individuals to start accepting payments. This IMHO is huge indie-friendly. And back then, for every payment gateway you had to be a registered company. Not sure if that relaxed rule translated to an uptick in growth.

kartickv 9y ago

As someone who doesn't know Stripe well, because it hasn't been available in India, is it just a payment gateway, allowing me to put a Buy button in my site or app to charge someone's credit card, debit card, net banking or Paytm?

Operyl 9y ago
Payment processor, so “buy button on site/app/etc”

ktta 9y ago

>In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users This is the statistic that will change the world more than a little bit. This is partly because the richest man in India has spent $25bn on telecom infrastructure and acquisition of new customers. Here's a related article - https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-new-customers-cost-cool-25bn-acquire-mukesh-ambani-has-made-business-worlds https://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-n...

nocoder 9y ago

This is going to be tough. The competition in payment ecosystem is pretty hot in India. You have Alibaba funded paytm with about 250 million users. They provide digital wallet services which can be used for buying anything from flights tickets to electronics online or paying for Uber. Apart from that they are also present offline, you can but grocery or even tea with that. Additionally they also have payments bank licence so you can have your bank account there itself. Then there is Jio money funded by India s richest man which also operates in telecom and has roughly 100 million users, they also have a payments bank licence. Finally there is Amazon pay, which is moving slowly but has recently tied up with lot of websites for movies or online food delivery. So the competition is likely to be fierce.

subbu 9y ago
YC has funded 2 Indian startups in this space: Razorpay, and Cashfree, and now Stripe has also entered the space. Along with the startups some big banks are also in the fray. I started with HDFC payments for my company's payments but moved away from them; they expect you to work at their pace. That'd have killed us by now. I wrote about my payment experiences here: https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-payments.html https://blog.simplyguest.com/payments/simplyguest-payments.h...
- sharmi 9y ago
  Hi Subbu, The canonical url for your page is set to http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-payments.html http://localhost:4000/payments/simplyguest-payments.html . That is not the best option for SEO :)
  - subbu 9y ago
    Thank you, Sharmi. I really appreciate you taking out time to look at the source and point out the issue. I have fixed the canonical url. I also noticed the feed url was wrong too. I have fixed that as well :)
arjunbajaj 9y ago
None of those support payments from customers outside India, a requirement most online businesses have.

pvsukale3 9y ago

Razorpay (funded by YC) is a competitor to Stripe in India. Has anyone tried using it? How was your experience?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sunilkumarc 9y ago
A couple of months back I wanted to try Razorpay for receiving payments from my app users. Just like donate button in PayPal. But Razorpay was not supporting independent developers at that time. While Stripe supports this feature beautifully, it wasn't supporting in India. Now I'm excited to hear this news.

adtac 9y ago

Oh god yes, thank you! I've wanted this for so long. I'm building a SaaS and I seriously considered paying $500 for Stripe Atlas to incorporate in the US just for Stripe. (I don't expect my crowd to be from any particular country, so a global payments vendor is the best option.) The state of payments here is sub-par; while providers are still coming up, the documentation is just not sufficient (at least not up to Stripe's standards), the APIs are a bit convoluted, and the whole thing feels shaky. Plus, Stripe is trusted by customers, so I bet at least a few of them would be more comfortable if they see the familiar Stripe payment form.

superasn 9y ago
I agree with you. The timing couldn't be better and I've tried most of the other payment processors but I didn't find them usable at all. Waiting eagerly to get my invite and hope this isn't some crippled version due to RBI regulations.

superasn 9y ago

Is the Indian Stripe account same in functionality as the US account? Or is it restricted in some way due to the strict RBI rules in India?

shripadk 9y ago
Hopefully without restrictions! Fingers crossed! If it's going to be restricted in some major way, then there won't be any difference between Stripe and say PayPal which makes it a non-starter. RBI really needs to loosen up a bit, especially when it comes to over-regulation of the Software sector.
adtac 9y ago
Yeah, this is the real question. I really hope this will have feature parity. At least the basic things like recurring payments in foreign currencies and stuff like that.
sukh 9y ago
We run a single product web store in India that has modest monthly transaction volume and care about the user experience a lot. All processors are required to do 3D Secure verification. Local processors have integration for NetBanking. International ones are card only but may have better developer experience. Apple Pay uses 3D Secure too but bypasses two-factor verfication by tokenization. Reliability/sucess rate is no longer as big of a deal with most competent processors. We've found the need to build custom tooling and abuse data more important for the Indian ecosystem.

akhatri_aus 9y ago

Can you do subscriptions, how does it work with the compulsory 3D secure rules?

temp9910 9y ago

I have really high hopes from this. There is currently no good way for a SaaS startup in India to get money from international customers. I think this is why many are forced to incorporate in the US/Singapore/etc. I am a single founder working on a SaaS project and receiving payments from outside India is one of the biggest challenges for me. I do not want to raise funds but may have to got that route just so that I can incorporate outside India and start receiving payments. I have three requests for Stripe: 1) I hope that Stripe does not come out with a limited version for India, and that it is possible to charge international customers a variable amount every month, like you can do in the US. 2) I also hope that they come up with a prompt way of issuing FIRCs for every payment received. Without an FIRC there is no way to prove that the transaction was an export and therefore you have to pay GST on it, which is normally 18% for services. This reason alone is pushing me to incorporate in some other country. I stand to lose thousands of dollars this year because I can't get an FIRC for the payments I receive via Paypal/Wire transfer/Transferwise. Paypal and Transferwise have procedures to get FIRCs, but when you approach their banks they either don't respond or come up with hundred reasons to not issue one. Citibank absolutely sucks at this. I really hope that Stripe just charges me whatever they want and couriers the FIRCs to my address automatically. 3) I hope that Stripe has a legal setup that is compatible with RBI regulations regarding the filling up of SOFTEX forms. There are some restrictions which in my understanding prohibit Indians from using international gateways like fastspring.

sudhirj 9y ago
How does paddle.com handle this? They take over as merchant of record, and so technically they're selling your SaaS and paying you royalties via a reverse invoice. Any idea if they need to or give our FIRCs?
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that paddle.com gets around the RBI restrictions for companies based outside of India selling to Indians?
  - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

danieltillett 9y ago

Does this allow companies outside of India to accept payment from Indians without an international credit card?

anilgulecha 9y ago
Isn't that true already? My friends and I have been able to use local bank debit cards and they work as expected on international sites.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Well yes and no. The vast majority of Indian credit and debit cards don’t work outside of India. You need to get special permission from your bank to be able to use an Indian CC outside of India [0]. 0. I have to say that I have not looked into this in detail in the last 12 months so if things have changed with the RBI I would be very happy to know.

0x62 9y ago

I'm still waiting for Stripe to launch in the UK's Crown Dependencies. I'm based in Jersey, and we have no (easy) marketplace payment solution. Currently using Safecharge, which is quite good, however the setup process requires submitting 10+ documents with details on the company structure, UBOs and nature of business.

kylehotchkiss 9y ago

Will this accept RuPay?