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Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notches-35-billion-

by pc 6y ago

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notches-35-billion-valuation-in-funding-round.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc...). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!

samschooler 6y ago
Do you know why that big spike happened? Is it possibly related to people being furloughed + having new side hustles they are just now working on/starting?
- wyxuan 6y ago
  idk, maybe easy access to contactless payments?
- RussianCow 6y ago
  Not OP, but my guess is businesses that previously had little to no online presence are scrambling to set something up so that they can continue serving customers during the pandemic.
Beefin 6y ago
Hey Patrick, understood that this is an extension of a previous round, but do you have any comments on the timing of this capital raise /w covid? I imagine, with the huge spike in ecommerce, your platforms are crushing it, but curious to hear your take.
- pc 6y ago
  We've noticed a few things -- - Enterprises pivoting -- brands going direct-to-consumer, malls pivoting to online business models (seriously), and other things like that. - SMBs going online: see this thread[0] from a French fruit seller, for example, or this thread[1] from a bar in Milwaukee. The restaurant down the street from where I used to live is now running a rapidly-growing online wine club. - Totally new startups are getting started in response to new needs. [0] https://twitter.com/FlorentSchmahl/status/1250283595358326784 https://twitter.com/FlorentSchmahl/status/125028359535832678... [1] https://twitter.com/danimalnelson/status/1240004111669460992 https://twitter.com/danimalnelson/status/1240004111669460992
  - mv4 6y ago
    wondering which of these new patterns are here to stay
  - prawn 6y ago
    We started https://do.delivery/ https://do.delivery/ to offer an online ordering option to locked down businesses, using Stripe Connect. Now all I can think about is other ways to use Connect. Many established businesses have broader e-commerce needs but I’ve seen farmers offer vege boxes and meal packs to great local support. Many smaller businesses are wary of investing much to start.
    - moneywoes 6y ago
      What did you build the landing page with? Looks very nice.
      - prawn 6y ago
        Thanks. Just custom. We built the original core in 36 hours and the landing page looked a bit different then, intending to be simple and barebones. My mother in law asked when I was going to finish the design, so I redid it instead.
stephenmc 6y ago
Irrespective of old news or new news, it's a fantastic achievement and ye should definitely be proud of it.
charlesju 6y ago
Congratulations. We've recently decided to go with Paypal Pro for better rates on micropayments. Do you guys plan to have a similar program soon?
- rococode 6y ago
  Seconded! We do micropayments in the $2-3 range and $0.30/transaction is a huge cut of our already slim margins. We're also in the process of migrating the bulk of our transactions to Paypal, but would love to switch back to primarily Stripe at some point as we have had terrible experiences with Paypal in the past.
- mkagenius 6y ago
  Related: Have people contacted Stripe's sales team for custom pricing for micro payments (its what they ask you to do on their pricing page, iirc)
- pc 6y ago
  Yeah, we don't like the current situation, and this is a topic of ongoing discussion. Credit card network fees make it tricky to do it well but we really want to find a way to make it work.
  - jcrben 6y ago
    Wish you could disintermediate credit card fees. I'm sort of hopeful that credit card surcharging might grow (https://www.cardx.com/ https://www.cardx.com/) and start competition on those costs.
    - kingbirdy 6y ago
      I don't have strong feelings either way on having consumers pay CC processing fees, but encouraging them to use debit cards online seems irresponsible given the non-existent fraud protections on debit cards. Of course it's technically consumers' responsibility to know and trade off that risk versus the savings, but at least in the US the sad reality is that personal finance education is woefully lacking or non-existent for most people and they don't know the difference.
belzebalex 6y ago
Is there any way coupons could be added directly on Checkout in the future?
- samg 6y ago
  Yes, coming soon! Email me at sgerstenzang@stripe.com if you'd like to try this feature out early.
  - melias 6y ago
    Are there any plans to allow for integration with 3rd party gift card platforms on the Stripe Checkout?
    - samg 6y ago
      Not at the moment, but would love to hear more about what you're looking for.
bskinny129 6y ago
I've been using Stripe for several years and love it. Switching to payment intents this year was seamless. One thing I'd love you guys to do is create your own QuickBooks connection app. Most companies offer their own - yours is through Sush.io with your logo and bad ratings. I can't get it to work and I'm not the only one.
- pc 6y ago
  Good feedback -- thank you. We'll take a look.
  - bskinny129 6y ago
    And while you're here, have you read Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies"? He is a very underrated thinker in the lack-of-progress area you've shown interest in.
- GVRV 6y ago
  I'm not at Stripe but would be keen to work on this as a side-project. Would you be willing to be user #1? If so, please ping me (email in profile). Thanks!
plantain 6y ago
My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transactions in the EU, where most of our customers are. Instead, because we're selling from Australia, we get charged 2.9% for some arbitrary reason. This coupled with 1) puts our all-in transaction fees at 5%+ :( 3) I think billing the vendor for refund fees is a really retrograde step - it increases friction in the decision for us when a customer asks for a refund, and industry wide is going to cause less happy customers and less card users online. It's already hard enough convincing Dutch/German customers to use a credit card online. If any non-EU companies know a cheaper way to process transactions in the EU, I'm all ears...
- pc 6y ago
  Great feedback... thank you. In case it's useful, some context on them: On (1), we started an FX team this year. (There are a lot of legal complexities here around how the funds move, who has title to what at which moment, and so on.) But we're investing significantly in improving it and it should get better soon. On (2), the core issue is card network pricing rules -- by design, they discriminate on the basis of where the business is located. We happily extend EU fees to all EU legal entities, however, and would be happy to work with you to set that up. On (3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly. Still, all the issues you bring up are real and I'd like us to find better solutions.
  - trevor-e 6y ago
    Just want to say thanks for being so transparent with your answers in this thread, really appreciated. As a fly on the wall to most of this -- I don't have a business myself, yet ;) -- I'm learning a lot so far.
    - 6y ago
nodesocket 6y ago
It's probably wishful thinking, but times like these would be super valuable and helpful if Stripe showed their daily processing volume and perhaps general aggregate statistics and graphs (per country). I know it's probably intellectual property and secret sauce, but imagine: "Since US Covid shutdown (as of March 13th) Stripe US processing volume is up X% or $Y billion." This general information would provide great context to the health of the US economy and e-commerce. I know other companies such as payroll processing (ADP) release numbers and the stock market uses those as an input to the health of the economy.
rstupek 6y ago
I found some difficulty with the documentation around submitting dictionary values since the "curl" documentation didn't include any examples. Example being address which wasn't obvious needed to be sent as address[city]=value instead of address.city=value
Kurtose 6y ago
Stripe seems to have understood Sequoia's Black Swan memo well.
arkh 6y ago
For E2E testing, a mocked Stripe with some state would be a boon. Because calling your test servers takes a lot of time (and some call results differ between test and prod mode). And using Wiremock is a bitch when creating on-the-fly random fixtures.
Despegar 6y ago
Why haven't you gone public yet? Airbnb raising money from private equity who undoubtedly wants to loan-to-own them should have discredited the idea that staying private longer is better than being a public company.
robhunter 6y ago
Stopping new Stripe Capital offers during the COVID-19 pandemic is completely understandable, but feels like it wasn't really well communicated to long-term clients. Will you continue to originate new Strike Capital offers? When?
- pc 6y ago
  Yes, we will! (And, while we are trying to make sure we understand the impact of Covid-19 across our lending portfolio, we haven't stopped extending new loans.)
  - robhunter 6y ago
    OK - for months, we had an available offer of $25k - disappeared in mid March despite minimal/normal churn at the time. Felt to us like the plug got pulled.
wilg 6y ago
We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. We've moved to Paddle which takes care of that for us. Recommend!
- krn 6y ago
  > We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. Chargebee does this on top of Stripe.
  - GeneralTspoon 6y ago
    They only work for subscriptions though - one-off payments (e.g. e-commerce sites) can't use them. (There are hacky workarounds - but likely not worth the effort)
- antoniodf 6y ago
  Hi! Thanks for this feedback. I work at Stripe on improving our tax reporting product. May you elaborate on what was missing exactly?
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    As far as I'm aware, Stripe has no tax product comparable to what a merchant of record like Paddle offers. Has this changed?
    - kmoriarty 6y ago
      Hey! I'm another Stripe working on tax compliance pain points. Would be keen to chat about your experience with Paddle and specifically what type of solution you are looking for w/r/t tax and/or product fulfillment. If you're up to chat, email me at kmoriarty@stripe.com. Either way, thanks for the feedback!
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        Just so I'm not misleading anyone, we're not actually using Paddle ourselves. I elaborated on why we ruled it out in another comment[1]. To explain where we're coming from here, I personally learned a classic first-time entrepreneur lesson the hard way some years ago: if we're not a payments business then we should focus on what we are, not on payment mechanics. The first time I started a B2C, I naively thought I could do better, and to be fair, I really did implement a simple, robust, flexible system that fit our needs well. But over time, even the better payment services started breaking APIs and neglecting documentation and dropping customer service standards and increasing prices, and maintaining those integrations became painful. Governments started changing their regulations and tax rules, and updating our systems to keep up with the ever-changing compliance and tax obligations become painful too. We also found that fraud and chargebacks weren't a significant problem for us, but surprisingly, churn due to unreliable card charges was unbelievably bad and could turn an otherwise healthy growth rate negative all on its own, which was not a good combination with the aforementioned drop in standards at the payment services. What we're now looking for, in a nutshell, is a service to which we can outsource payment processing, subscription management, and all of the sales tax collection, reporting and remittance obligations. I don't want to use APIs or webhooks any more than I absolutely have to. I want to fill in correct, context-aware, all-inclusive prices on our pricing page with ideally one line of code. I want to hand our customers off smoothly to a well-designed, batteries-included sign-up flow with ideally one line of code. I want a simple notification to reach my server when a customer has paid us so we can have our systems respond accordingly, and I want simple notifications if anything has gone wrong so we can contact our customer or payment service and deal with it. I do not want to know what the current sales tax rates are in Western Nowhere, Somecountry, and I certainly do not want to have to sign up for a government programme and file reports and remit taxes there because once upon a time we had one customer who signed up for one month and we collected 1.50 Nowheredollars in sales tax. I do not want to have any UI on my site and therefore any code behind it for upgrading, downgrading, cancelling, refunding, retrying failed charges or sending flowers on my customer's birthday, except to the extent that we provide a simple way for a customer to indicate they want to do something and we can then hand off the mechanics to the payment service if we agree, again ideally with one line of code. I do want a simple, effective dashboard facility on the payment service that lets me see and control all of those things (well, maybe not the flowers) and any other relevant settings if I want to, and I want it to be somebody else's problem to implement and maintain that facility. I don't know what proportion of our revenues we'd be willing to give up for a service like that, but it would be far higher than anything we pay to any payment service today. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896600
spraveenitpro 6y ago
Please enable native Bitcoin transactions, we are looking at a complete collapse of the existing financial system.
eruci 6y ago
I'm both a Stripe and a Paypal user. I wish Stripe made recurring payments as easy to implement as Paypal.
- theseanstewart 6y ago
  Having experience implementing and working with people that have used both, I'd love to hear why you think PayPal handles subscriptions better than Stripe.
  - eruci 6y ago
    In Paypal you just create a subscription button and you are done. Paypal takes care of creating the customer profile, etc. In Stripe there are a few more hoops to jump.
dannyw 6y ago
Patrick, we switched away from Stripe because your risk management systems kept declining valid cards in certain low-GDP countries, and there was no way to override. We are one of the larger SaaS companies and as a personal lover of Stripe, it was surprising to me that you couldn’t customise these systems, esp at our volume. We switched to Ayden and saw very significant revenue increases in those countries; because valid cards stopped getting declined.
- pc 6y ago
  That sounds concerning -- could you email mjahr@stripe.com with more details?
- kwchang 6y ago
  Hi dannyw, I'm a PM on the team that works on acceptance rates and fraud at Stripe. Would you be open to chatting more about your experience? I'd really appreciate it so that we could look into this and improve it. My email is: kathy@stripe.com
gen220 6y ago
In the last few months, I put together a tiny static website for my SO to sell her photographs to clients, and I budgeted a lot of time for integrating a payments solution. Like many others will say, I was pleasantly surprised how little time the integration step took. I used the "beta" react hooks integration, and the UX of getting it all set up was basically flawless. I found the documentation (especially the quickstarts/tutorials) to be incredibly helpful. Four pieces of constructive feedback: - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure. - I found the API documentation to be very good on big screens, but relatively painful on smaller screens. - On my personal laptop (an older thinkpad), scrolling through the docs was unresponsive at times. In general, I'm a fan of the "everything-on-one-page" approach, because it makes grepping the docs easier. But I think that the quantity of dynamic elements in the API interferes with this approach :/ - I don't appreciate applications that hijack ctrl+f. I appreciate that you can double click to get native browser search, and that this is explained in the modal, but I really wonder if this helps people navigate more efficiently. I appreciate that the work that's gone into this feature must be very impressive, but I'd prefer a search bar with a different hotkey than ctrl+f. Might be worth AB testing. Ending on a note of praise, the dashboard experience is incredible. Huge kudos on how far it's come, and how easy it is for nontechnical people to use and discover.
- mikeappell 6y ago
  > - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure. Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when looking for recipes/tutorials you run into a lot of seemingly duplicative content which makes it confusing to figure out which is right for you. I had this issue trying to create Connected Payments, specifically.
mchusma 6y ago
Thanks for reaching out. You have a giant feature gap, but also an org problem I think and I would like to explain because I have been trying to get the giant feature gap filled for about 3 years and people there seem to do whatever the opposite of caring is. It relates to being able to test production environments safely, which in our opinion is something every company should do extensive production testing. Based on many support conversations with me trying to get a feature built here over the last year, Stripe's "official position" appears to be "never test your production application." Sometimes they say "do it but only for $1 every other month", which is functionally the same as saying "don't ever test production." if you don't have any products or services for $1 and do regular deployments. I understand the reasons why you don't want people using live credit cards to test in production (e.g. factoring), but that isn't what I think most users want to do (it is not what we want to use). We don't want to use real cards at all but we want to test production. The best answer to customers who want to test in production is to give them the ability to safety test live cards. Please see the attached specification I pulled together which would solve this problem for Stripe, card networks, and your customers. If Stripe cannot implement some feature like "Safe Live Testing", then we will ultimately be forced to migrate away from Stripe. This is a critical feature for us, and I am sure many customers. https://tidy-static-websites.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stripe+Safe+Live+Testing+Spec.pdf https://tidy-static-websites.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stri... We thought our integration with stripe was down in production last week, and we could not run any checks to tell if that was actually the case. This would have fixed it for us. I think there is also a cultural issue here because I believe any mention of "production testing" is currently falling in the compliance camp of Stripe. Which means their job is to prevent fraud, but nobody seems to say "its ok to want this. The response every time from support and compliance teams is basically "you are bad to test in production, never do it." But they instead should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. This is a gap on our side, and we should fix it." If there is an issue with Visa/Mastercard agreements or something, then they should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. We are completely unable to support it because Visa has this rule that says X, we are working with them to change it. Here is how you can contact Visa to express your support for the rule change, we are spearheading a campaign to ensure customers can do this." I hope this feedback is helpful, and while the "spec" is not very good, I did put substantial effort into thinking through a solution here, so I hope you review it and get it to the right team. I will also email, thanks!
doanerock 6y ago
Any plans to go public?
Azrael3000 6y ago
I did an online shop for my in-laws due to the shutdown and it's working really great with Stripe and Woocommerce. So massive thanks for that. We had one hick-up, which was the fault of a wrong PHP setting and we got several duplicate orders as a result. In the stripe dashboard I could clearly see failed webhooks in the post mortem. So if there were some kind of email alarm if an error threshold is exceeded that would be nice. I did not find any such feature, if I should have missed it please point me towards the right direction. Cheers.
wegymoo 6y ago
I've been making lots of little business apps and integrating them with Stripe. My main handicap has been the need to create a different Stripe account each time. It would be nice if I could have multiple sets of api keys under one account for each of my businesses
- pc 6y ago
  We added that last year! (Or maybe the year before...)
notwhereyouare 6y ago
i'm asking in a very unofficial position. The company I work for is in the travel industry and we've received a large number of charge backs compared to normal. Our agents are working as best as they can, but our tools were never really designed for 5000+ tickets to be active at 1 time, so it's slow going for them as they contact the guest, then contact the provider, then talk to the guest, etc. Are you going to offer some lenience to companies who have gotten a huge spike in charge backs just due to an increase time in support tickets? We are trying to find ways to just refund the guest where we know the hotel has closed, but there's no master list of that so we can't just blindly refund everybody
- patio11 6y ago
  I work at Stripe. Many companies in travel (and similarly affected industries) are having challenges shaped similarly to yours. There is a very active conversation in the industry about what we can do about the standard process for chargebacks to support this better. (Chargebacks were never designed to be a massively high-volume simultaneous event.) Concretely you could imagine some specific consequences of chargebacks. I don’t have anything specific that I can share as of this exact minute with respect to each of those concrete consequences, but we’re working on this very actively. A lot of this work requires coordination with other firms. Chargebacks are broadly adjudicated by banks with reference to the rules established by the card networks, so we have limited control over per-chargeback decisions, but the industry is moving quickly on trying to decide what to do about this sort of chargeback given the circumstances. As always, we’re in the corner of companies trying to do the right thing. As you get through this, if there’s specific things we can help on, please flag them to us; we can’t promise saying yes to every request but we can promise you’ll have our attention.
  - notwhereyouare 6y ago
    Thanks for your response. We are more just concerned about being dropped over the large number of charge backs in a small period. So much so that we are actively implementing a new provider as backup so we aren’t stranded if we get cut off.
consultSKI 6y ago
love stripe, but you have a death spiral in your process. I tried to reactivate my account. no longer have the old domain. so I can't contact support because I can't log in. it takes WEEKS to get paid with a new account. after more than five years [on and off] with you, I would have hoped for a better process. #justSayin since you asked. p.s. i emailed this too.
- edwinwee 6y ago
  Hm, sorry about this. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I see what's going on?
stevoski 6y ago
Hey Patrick, It would be great if Stripe Checkout included VAT-related features: * Detect country and - if needed - add appropriate VAT * Allow customer to add a valid VAT number, so that when appropriate tax is not charged * Offer clear reporting on what VAT has been collected for each jurisdiction I realise this is a big, big can of worms. But that’s why we use Stripe, right? For help handling that big can of worms that is international payment collections. :)
- jackerman 6y ago
  Josh here from the Stripe Checkout team. We're actively thinking about VAT-related features for Checkout. We'd love to chat; drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com
  - stevoski 6y ago
    Josh, I appreciate you being receptive. But I've been asking Stripe for this since 2015. I don't know what info I can possibly offer you that you surely haven't heard from tons of customers over the years.
- the-real-jap 6y ago
  My company uses Chargebee as the subscription management layer (between stripe and our systems; they perform charging, billing and dunning for us, and also offer us a slick interface to hand out rebates and the like); they are able to at least determine the correct VAT amount for European customers (based on IP/asking the user). It's not free though, but I'm happy we are able to focus on our product instead of those things.
mkchoi212 6y ago
Find it really cool that the cofounder is directly reaching out to the developer community. Keep up the great work :)
pendingHN 6y ago
I'll send an email later as well, but I just wanted to raise that we are very concerned about our ability to continue integrating with Stripe. We've loved using Stripe for years, but given all of the uncertainty surrounding the tipsi-stripe project and the lack of an official stripe solution for React-Native, we're questioning how wise it is to be dependant on Stripe. I've seen others speaking to your staff on twitter and github about this, so I don't think we're alone. There must be hundreds (thousands?) of apps using this integration and all of them have been stuck in limbo for many months now. We would like to enable SCA, but the beta version of this project doesn't seem to have documentation beyond a few comments in github issues here and there, and the discord is almost solely populated by people asking how to use the beta and no one can answer them. I think whichever of the major payment platforms extends a hand out to the React-Native community first, with a confident, well documented official project, will be celebrated and would cement themselves as THE payment platform for people using React-Native.
- ctraganos 6y ago
  @pendingHN @chris_trag from Stripe here. The React Native situation is very much top-of-mind and we're working on the right lasting solution for your business and the RN community. When we had submitted the PRs to provide 3D Secure / SCA support, we had not anticipated the work would be left on an experimental branch for this amount of time. This spring we've been able to connect with the previous maintainers and understand the business situation behind this community repo. With all things open source, we want to be mindful of projects that are run by the community while determining which key libraries not in active development/maintenance. All this to say, peace of mind and clarity on how React Native devs can implement Stripe with ease is a priority and I apologize for the limbo you've been in. Thank you so much for your patience as we pull the remediation together. Happy to chat directly as well -> trag at stripe dot com
dalex00 6y ago
From sw development perspective how do you create the public documentation and internal system process documentation? Tools, process and responbilities would be interesting for me for such complex business modell. Hopefully someone can shine a light..
lllmarclll 6y ago
What an excellent answer
AnssiH 6y ago
Probably not news to Stripe and not a priority, but just thought I'd mention it: The only reason we are not using Stripe is the lack of support for Finnish payment methods - around 70% of our retail website customers pay using the local "bank buttons" and 10% use local mobile payments (MobilePay, Pivo).
chrisjarvis 6y ago
Using Stripe Checkout (where you create a stripe session on ur server and redirect the client to stripe to complete payment and then listen for a Webhook that says the checkout session was completed) was so amazingly easy to setup and use. My app that uses it will up and running soon, Stripe has been a pleasure to use so far!
windlep 6y ago
My biggest two issues: 1) Stripe docs are inaccurate. They frequently don't work exactly as they describe for given subscription workflows. Sometimes an API call is entirely wrong, sometimes it doesn't return the data the docs indicate, and sometimes the arguments it describes just doesn't exist. (Yes, I've ensured I'm using the latest API version in use). 2) The docs have no changelog. There's an API changelog that indicates when API's change, there's nothing indicating when entire chunks of the documentation change on the website, along with the recommended way to integrate. The most obvious example of this is that the subscription workflow docs got a huge makeover in the past year (sometime), with some really great flowchart diagrams. But back to point #1, some of the API calls listed here are not actually valid. If I've just missed the changelog for the website docs, please point me in the right direction. :) For reference, I'm using Node at the moment, but I've also integrated with Python, and there were breaker bugs in those docs as well. I eventually end up reading the HTTP API docs, then going through the SDK's to see where they went wrong, or the docs went wrong.
switch11 6y ago
Patrick, good to see you responding I'd like to add a few points, especially those considering Stripe vs Paypal This: Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved. We are very thankful to Stripe because Paypal left us high and dry We found out they were calling up our customers and pretty much forcing them to do disputes They also locked our funds FOR SIX MONTHS If we did not have backup funds and if we did not have Stripe we literally would not be able to continue as a company Paypal basically have ZERO consideration of the fact that you are running a business and that your payment provider should not just randomly end the business arrangement Our dispute rate for the last $1.5 million processed through Stripe is roughly 0.3% whereas with Paypal it was considerably higher. I even have saved emails from our customers of Paypal asking them to open disputes even when they said they were happy and did not want to Even eBay stopped using Paypal, and switched to Adeyn consider how extreme things have to be if the company from which you were spun off as a separate company (eBay spun off Paypal), even they stop working with you Stripe is much, much better than Paypal Most importantly, it is much more dependable, much more small business and startup friendly, and developer first mentality Paypal always has the attitude of - We're big and we don't give two hoots about you Whereas Stripe they will always talk to you as a fellow human being * Stripe: The CEO is coming here to Hacker News and personally responding As are various members of the Stripe Team Paypal: Will freeze your account for no reason at all. Will not even respond. The lady on the phone will shout at you even though you are politely asking why account is frozen. Plus as a bonus they will freeze funds for SIX Months They froze funds equal to TWENTY TIMES the total disputes and refunds combined total from the Past 5 years. For SIX MONTHS
- littlethings 6y ago
  Awful. Happened to my friends too. The funniest part is, they still get away with it. But the consumers have choice and I am glad they are choosing Stripe over PP. Also, if anyone at PayPal reads it: screw you, I will never give you a damn cent.
larossmann 6y ago
Billing the vendor for refund fees is the biggest gripe I have. It is not only for the self-centered reason that it would affect my business – it is because it contributes to the consolidation of ecommerce to only a few select companies. It adds friction to consumer transactions with small businesses, causing consumers to become aggravated with these small businesses. It conditions consumers to believe it is easier to deal with large businesses that always seem to have a "cancel" button and easy-order-cancellation policies, opposed to the small businesses that just seem to make things hard and expensive for no good reason. This will contribute to the consolidation of ecommerce to a small number of multi-billion dollar players like Walmart, eBay, Amazon, etc. Allow me to explain: If someone makes a purchase of a $1500 ultrasonic cleaner from me, and then realizes they made a mistake, I now have to tell them there’s a $43.50 restocking fee, even if they call me 2 minutes after they place the order. This will leave a disgusting taste in the customer’s mouth, but I have to do it, because I can’t expose myself to a $43.50 fee for something I have zero control over. That customer may eventually notice that Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, do not charge such a fee. The customer has no idea why – they just know dealing with Amazon means less friction. The customer will now utilize Amazon more. Many will say that this is a dumb gripe. “If you don’t like it go somewhere else!” PayPal instituted this policy as well. They backed down temporarily after people made a stink about it, but months later continued forward with the policy. I currently use a merchant services provider that does not implement these fees, but for how long? My time in my industry has taught me that companies will often wait for one “outlier” to make controversial reforms to their platform/products before doing it themselves. Whether it is gluing the battery inside of a cellphone, or adding strange fees to transactions. Once a profitable, anti-consumer move succeeds with the company not going out of business, it emboldens other firms to do the same. My merchant services provider doesn’t charge this fee. Yet. But they saw Stripe charge it, and get away with it. They saw PayPal charge it and have another more profitable quarter. The outrage lasted a week, the increased profit lasted forever. “Gee, it isn’t a business killer after all. Maybe we should do it too!” will come up in corporate boardrooms across America. Then, we’re left with a landscape where the only companies left in ecommerce who can offer customers friction-free order cancellations are Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Who wants that? Yes, people can say “just absorb the fee if you don’t want your customers to be mad at you.” How? I am already competing as a dude with no outside financing with a trillion dollar company – I’m winning if I am making any sales at all! Now I’m expected to compete on price when I have to absorb fees when customers cancel an order? Let’s say you manage to claw your way into a market by offering a better product, or after sales service on that product to the point where you can compete with Amazon. That is a miracle in and of itself. To then have to deal with a minefield of additional charges that your competitor doesn’t have to is just another nail in the coffin of small-business ecommerce. I find it awful, and I protest using these services. I cut my exposure to paypal by about 95% and dodged a bullet in not signing up for stripe. I suggest the same to my listenership anytime someone brings up or mentions a merchant services provider that I know charges this fee. Even if they say it won't affect their business much because they do not deal with lots of cancellations, it is the greater implication I make them aware of. No one wants a market where the only companies with a free "cancel order" button on their site are eBay and Amazon. Scott Galloway also has a lot of excellent content with arguments on breaking up Amazon. Whether or not one agrees with his solutions or assessments of the problems Amazon creates and how to fix them – it is clear that they are dominating the race. I am not suggesting that we hold Amazon back – just that we don’t purposely trip companies doing their best to keep up.
misrab 6y ago
Would love Stripe to handle bank transfers as a payment method! Many of our customers prefer this method over card payments. Then Stripe would fully cover our payment use-case; I'd love to use Stripe alone for payment, analytics and security. Right now we can't :(
sadovmychyi 6y ago
Any plans to make IDR currency into zero decimals so we can charge more than ~$64? Right now you cannot charge more than a million in any currency (which is reasonable) but IDR still has decimals.
m11a 6y ago
I'm late, so you probably won't see this (might shoot you an email with this same thought.), but I want to echo a piece of feedback I sent to you last year (and the year before I think): Faster checkout. And improved trust (somehow). I hear you folks acquired fast.co which seems to be a step in this direction. Entering card details on every site is problematic. Some customers are still worried about it and prefer to use PayPal. Indeed, when I offer both as an option, and make clear Stripe payments go via Stripe and we don't see details, about 80% of people choose to pay with PayPal. Stripe Checkout, being on your platform and not our sites, seems to be a step in the right direction. I'd also like to see faster payments. My opinion: checkout takes too long. Sites making people create accounts, go through 4 pages and then enter card is bad. -------- I think, honestly, integrating fast.co into Stripe and making it highly encouraged is the future. Go a step further and encourage sites to stop making users create accounts. SSO-style system, perhaps, but easy to integrate. Authentication is a pain for me as a customer on sites - I have too many accounts and it drains a lot of time combined. I really think your company has the power to make a difference to this problem.
vinniejames 6y ago
When will you bring back crypto payments?
sholladay 6y ago
I need destination subscriptions - subscribe a customer on my platform to a plan on my platform and share some of the revenue with a Connect account. The workarounds needed to solve this use case are very clunky.

by pc 6y ago

samschooler 6y ago

Do you know why that big spike happened? Is it possibly related to people being furloughed + having new side hustles they are just now working on/starting?

wyxuan 6y ago
idk, maybe easy access to contactless payments?
RussianCow 6y ago
Not OP, but my guess is businesses that previously had little to no online presence are scrambling to set something up so that they can continue serving customers during the pandemic.

Beefin 6y ago

Hey Patrick, understood that this is an extension of a previous round, but do you have any comments on the timing of this capital raise /w covid? I imagine, with the huge spike in ecommerce, your platforms are crushing it, but curious to hear your take.

pc 6y ago
We've noticed a few things -- - Enterprises pivoting -- brands going direct-to-consumer, malls pivoting to online business models (seriously), and other things like that. - SMBs going online: see this thread[0] from a French fruit seller, for example, or this thread[1] from a bar in Milwaukee. The restaurant down the street from where I used to live is now running a rapidly-growing online wine club. - Totally new startups are getting started in response to new needs. [0] https://twitter.com/FlorentSchmahl/status/1250283595358326784 https://twitter.com/FlorentSchmahl/status/125028359535832678... [1] https://twitter.com/danimalnelson/status/1240004111669460992 https://twitter.com/danimalnelson/status/1240004111669460992
- mv4 6y ago
  wondering which of these new patterns are here to stay
- prawn 6y ago
  We started https://do.delivery/ https://do.delivery/ to offer an online ordering option to locked down businesses, using Stripe Connect. Now all I can think about is other ways to use Connect. Many established businesses have broader e-commerce needs but I’ve seen farmers offer vege boxes and meal packs to great local support. Many smaller businesses are wary of investing much to start.
  - moneywoes 6y ago
    What did you build the landing page with? Looks very nice.
    - prawn 6y ago
      Thanks. Just custom. We built the original core in 36 hours and the landing page looked a bit different then, intending to be simple and barebones. My mother in law asked when I was going to finish the design, so I redid it instead.

stephenmc 6y ago

Irrespective of old news or new news, it's a fantastic achievement and ye should definitely be proud of it.

charlesju 6y ago

Congratulations. We've recently decided to go with Paypal Pro for better rates on micropayments. Do you guys plan to have a similar program soon?

rococode 6y ago
Seconded! We do micropayments in the $2-3 range and $0.30/transaction is a huge cut of our already slim margins. We're also in the process of migrating the bulk of our transactions to Paypal, but would love to switch back to primarily Stripe at some point as we have had terrible experiences with Paypal in the past.
mkagenius 6y ago
Related: Have people contacted Stripe's sales team for custom pricing for micro payments (its what they ask you to do on their pricing page, iirc)
pc 6y ago
Yeah, we don't like the current situation, and this is a topic of ongoing discussion. Credit card network fees make it tricky to do it well but we really want to find a way to make it work.
- jcrben 6y ago
  Wish you could disintermediate credit card fees. I'm sort of hopeful that credit card surcharging might grow (https://www.cardx.com/ https://www.cardx.com/) and start competition on those costs.
  - kingbirdy 6y ago
    I don't have strong feelings either way on having consumers pay CC processing fees, but encouraging them to use debit cards online seems irresponsible given the non-existent fraud protections on debit cards. Of course it's technically consumers' responsibility to know and trade off that risk versus the savings, but at least in the US the sad reality is that personal finance education is woefully lacking or non-existent for most people and they don't know the difference.

belzebalex 6y ago

Is there any way coupons could be added directly on Checkout in the future?

samg 6y ago
Yes, coming soon! Email me at sgerstenzang@stripe.com if you'd like to try this feature out early.
- melias 6y ago
  Are there any plans to allow for integration with 3rd party gift card platforms on the Stripe Checkout?
  - samg 6y ago
    Not at the moment, but would love to hear more about what you're looking for.

bskinny129 6y ago

I've been using Stripe for several years and love it. Switching to payment intents this year was seamless. One thing I'd love you guys to do is create your own QuickBooks connection app. Most companies offer their own - yours is through Sush.io with your logo and bad ratings. I can't get it to work and I'm not the only one.

pc 6y ago
Good feedback -- thank you. We'll take a look.
- bskinny129 6y ago
  And while you're here, have you read Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies"? He is a very underrated thinker in the lack-of-progress area you've shown interest in.
GVRV 6y ago
I'm not at Stripe but would be keen to work on this as a side-project. Would you be willing to be user #1? If so, please ping me (email in profile). Thanks!

plantain 6y ago

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transactions in the EU, where most of our customers are. Instead, because we're selling from Australia, we get charged 2.9% for some arbitrary reason. This coupled with 1) puts our all-in transaction fees at 5%+ :( 3) I think billing the vendor for refund fees is a really retrograde step - it increases friction in the decision for us when a customer asks for a refund, and industry wide is going to cause less happy customers and less card users online. It's already hard enough convincing Dutch/German customers to use a credit card online. If any non-EU companies know a cheaper way to process transactions in the EU, I'm all ears...

pc 6y ago
Great feedback... thank you. In case it's useful, some context on them: On (1), we started an FX team this year. (There are a lot of legal complexities here around how the funds move, who has title to what at which moment, and so on.) But we're investing significantly in improving it and it should get better soon. On (2), the core issue is card network pricing rules -- by design, they discriminate on the basis of where the business is located. We happily extend EU fees to all EU legal entities, however, and would be happy to work with you to set that up. On (3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly. Still, all the issues you bring up are real and I'd like us to find better solutions.
- trevor-e 6y ago
  Just want to say thanks for being so transparent with your answers in this thread, really appreciated. As a fly on the wall to most of this -- I don't have a business myself, yet ;) -- I'm learning a lot so far.
  - 6y ago

nodesocket 6y ago

It's probably wishful thinking, but times like these would be super valuable and helpful if Stripe showed their daily processing volume and perhaps general aggregate statistics and graphs (per country). I know it's probably intellectual property and secret sauce, but imagine: "Since US Covid shutdown (as of March 13th) Stripe US processing volume is up X% or $Y billion." This general information would provide great context to the health of the US economy and e-commerce. I know other companies such as payroll processing (ADP) release numbers and the stock market uses those as an input to the health of the economy.

rstupek 6y ago

I found some difficulty with the documentation around submitting dictionary values since the "curl" documentation didn't include any examples. Example being address which wasn't obvious needed to be sent as address[city]=value instead of address.city=value

Kurtose 6y ago

Stripe seems to have understood Sequoia's Black Swan memo well.

arkh 6y ago

For E2E testing, a mocked Stripe with some state would be a boon. Because calling your test servers takes a lot of time (and some call results differ between test and prod mode). And using Wiremock is a bitch when creating on-the-fly random fixtures.

Despegar 6y ago

Why haven't you gone public yet? Airbnb raising money from private equity who undoubtedly wants to loan-to-own them should have discredited the idea that staying private longer is better than being a public company.

robhunter 6y ago

Stopping new Stripe Capital offers during the COVID-19 pandemic is completely understandable, but feels like it wasn't really well communicated to long-term clients. Will you continue to originate new Strike Capital offers? When?

pc 6y ago
Yes, we will! (And, while we are trying to make sure we understand the impact of Covid-19 across our lending portfolio, we haven't stopped extending new loans.)
- robhunter 6y ago
  OK - for months, we had an available offer of $25k - disappeared in mid March despite minimal/normal churn at the time. Felt to us like the plug got pulled.

wilg 6y ago

We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. We've moved to Paddle which takes care of that for us. Recommend!

krn 6y ago
> We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. Chargebee does this on top of Stripe.
- GeneralTspoon 6y ago
  They only work for subscriptions though - one-off payments (e.g. e-commerce sites) can't use them. (There are hacky workarounds - but likely not worth the effort)
antoniodf 6y ago
Hi! Thanks for this feedback. I work at Stripe on improving our tax reporting product. May you elaborate on what was missing exactly?
- Silhouette 6y ago
  As far as I'm aware, Stripe has no tax product comparable to what a merchant of record like Paddle offers. Has this changed?
  - kmoriarty 6y ago
    Hey! I'm another Stripe working on tax compliance pain points. Would be keen to chat about your experience with Paddle and specifically what type of solution you are looking for w/r/t tax and/or product fulfillment. If you're up to chat, email me at kmoriarty@stripe.com. Either way, thanks for the feedback!
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      Just so I'm not misleading anyone, we're not actually using Paddle ourselves. I elaborated on why we ruled it out in another comment[1]. To explain where we're coming from here, I personally learned a classic first-time entrepreneur lesson the hard way some years ago: if we're not a payments business then we should focus on what we are, not on payment mechanics. The first time I started a B2C, I naively thought I could do better, and to be fair, I really did implement a simple, robust, flexible system that fit our needs well. But over time, even the better payment services started breaking APIs and neglecting documentation and dropping customer service standards and increasing prices, and maintaining those integrations became painful. Governments started changing their regulations and tax rules, and updating our systems to keep up with the ever-changing compliance and tax obligations become painful too. We also found that fraud and chargebacks weren't a significant problem for us, but surprisingly, churn due to unreliable card charges was unbelievably bad and could turn an otherwise healthy growth rate negative all on its own, which was not a good combination with the aforementioned drop in standards at the payment services. What we're now looking for, in a nutshell, is a service to which we can outsource payment processing, subscription management, and all of the sales tax collection, reporting and remittance obligations. I don't want to use APIs or webhooks any more than I absolutely have to. I want to fill in correct, context-aware, all-inclusive prices on our pricing page with ideally one line of code. I want to hand our customers off smoothly to a well-designed, batteries-included sign-up flow with ideally one line of code. I want a simple notification to reach my server when a customer has paid us so we can have our systems respond accordingly, and I want simple notifications if anything has gone wrong so we can contact our customer or payment service and deal with it. I do not want to know what the current sales tax rates are in Western Nowhere, Somecountry, and I certainly do not want to have to sign up for a government programme and file reports and remit taxes there because once upon a time we had one customer who signed up for one month and we collected 1.50 Nowheredollars in sales tax. I do not want to have any UI on my site and therefore any code behind it for upgrading, downgrading, cancelling, refunding, retrying failed charges or sending flowers on my customer's birthday, except to the extent that we provide a simple way for a customer to indicate they want to do something and we can then hand off the mechanics to the payment service if we agree, again ideally with one line of code. I do want a simple, effective dashboard facility on the payment service that lets me see and control all of those things (well, maybe not the flowers) and any other relevant settings if I want to, and I want it to be somebody else's problem to implement and maintain that facility. I don't know what proportion of our revenues we'd be willing to give up for a service like that, but it would be far higher than anything we pay to any payment service today. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896600

spraveenitpro 6y ago

Please enable native Bitcoin transactions, we are looking at a complete collapse of the existing financial system.

eruci 6y ago

I'm both a Stripe and a Paypal user. I wish Stripe made recurring payments as easy to implement as Paypal.

theseanstewart 6y ago
Having experience implementing and working with people that have used both, I'd love to hear why you think PayPal handles subscriptions better than Stripe.
- eruci 6y ago
  In Paypal you just create a subscription button and you are done. Paypal takes care of creating the customer profile, etc. In Stripe there are a few more hoops to jump.

dannyw 6y ago

Patrick, we switched away from Stripe because your risk management systems kept declining valid cards in certain low-GDP countries, and there was no way to override. We are one of the larger SaaS companies and as a personal lover of Stripe, it was surprising to me that you couldn’t customise these systems, esp at our volume. We switched to Ayden and saw very significant revenue increases in those countries; because valid cards stopped getting declined.

pc 6y ago
That sounds concerning -- could you email mjahr@stripe.com with more details?
kwchang 6y ago
Hi dannyw, I'm a PM on the team that works on acceptance rates and fraud at Stripe. Would you be open to chatting more about your experience? I'd really appreciate it so that we could look into this and improve it. My email is: kathy@stripe.com

gen220 6y ago

In the last few months, I put together a tiny static website for my SO to sell her photographs to clients, and I budgeted a lot of time for integrating a payments solution. Like many others will say, I was pleasantly surprised how little time the integration step took. I used the "beta" react hooks integration, and the UX of getting it all set up was basically flawless. I found the documentation (especially the quickstarts/tutorials) to be incredibly helpful. Four pieces of constructive feedback: - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure. - I found the API documentation to be very good on big screens, but relatively painful on smaller screens. - On my personal laptop (an older thinkpad), scrolling through the docs was unresponsive at times. In general, I'm a fan of the "everything-on-one-page" approach, because it makes grepping the docs easier. But I think that the quantity of dynamic elements in the API interferes with this approach :/ - I don't appreciate applications that hijack ctrl+f. I appreciate that you can double click to get native browser search, and that this is explained in the modal, but I really wonder if this helps people navigate more efficiently. I appreciate that the work that's gone into this feature must be very impressive, but I'd prefer a search bar with a different hotkey than ctrl+f. Might be worth AB testing. Ending on a note of praise, the dashboard experience is incredible. Huge kudos on how far it's come, and how easy it is for nontechnical people to use and discover.

mikeappell 6y ago
> - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure. Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when looking for recipes/tutorials you run into a lot of seemingly duplicative content which makes it confusing to figure out which is right for you. I had this issue trying to create Connected Payments, specifically.

mchusma 6y ago

Thanks for reaching out. You have a giant feature gap, but also an org problem I think and I would like to explain because I have been trying to get the giant feature gap filled for about 3 years and people there seem to do whatever the opposite of caring is. It relates to being able to test production environments safely, which in our opinion is something every company should do extensive production testing. Based on many support conversations with me trying to get a feature built here over the last year, Stripe's "official position" appears to be "never test your production application." Sometimes they say "do it but only for $1 every other month", which is functionally the same as saying "don't ever test production." if you don't have any products or services for $1 and do regular deployments. I understand the reasons why you don't want people using live credit cards to test in production (e.g. factoring), but that isn't what I think most users want to do (it is not what we want to use). We don't want to use real cards at all but we want to test production. The best answer to customers who want to test in production is to give them the ability to safety test live cards. Please see the attached specification I pulled together which would solve this problem for Stripe, card networks, and your customers. If Stripe cannot implement some feature like "Safe Live Testing", then we will ultimately be forced to migrate away from Stripe. This is a critical feature for us, and I am sure many customers. https://tidy-static-websites.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stripe+Safe+Live+Testing+Spec.pdf https://tidy-static-websites.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stri... We thought our integration with stripe was down in production last week, and we could not run any checks to tell if that was actually the case. This would have fixed it for us. I think there is also a cultural issue here because I believe any mention of "production testing" is currently falling in the compliance camp of Stripe. Which means their job is to prevent fraud, but nobody seems to say "its ok to want this. The response every time from support and compliance teams is basically "you are bad to test in production, never do it." But they instead should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. This is a gap on our side, and we should fix it." If there is an issue with Visa/Mastercard agreements or something, then they should say "I totally understand why you would want to test your production site. We are completely unable to support it because Visa has this rule that says X, we are working with them to change it. Here is how you can contact Visa to express your support for the rule change, we are spearheading a campaign to ensure customers can do this." I hope this feedback is helpful, and while the "spec" is not very good, I did put substantial effort into thinking through a solution here, so I hope you review it and get it to the right team. I will also email, thanks!

doanerock 6y ago

Any plans to go public?

Azrael3000 6y ago

I did an online shop for my in-laws due to the shutdown and it's working really great with Stripe and Woocommerce. So massive thanks for that. We had one hick-up, which was the fault of a wrong PHP setting and we got several duplicate orders as a result. In the stripe dashboard I could clearly see failed webhooks in the post mortem. So if there were some kind of email alarm if an error threshold is exceeded that would be nice. I did not find any such feature, if I should have missed it please point me towards the right direction. Cheers.

wegymoo 6y ago

I've been making lots of little business apps and integrating them with Stripe. My main handicap has been the need to create a different Stripe account each time. It would be nice if I could have multiple sets of api keys under one account for each of my businesses

pc 6y ago
We added that last year! (Or maybe the year before...)

notwhereyouare 6y ago

i'm asking in a very unofficial position. The company I work for is in the travel industry and we've received a large number of charge backs compared to normal. Our agents are working as best as they can, but our tools were never really designed for 5000+ tickets to be active at 1 time, so it's slow going for them as they contact the guest, then contact the provider, then talk to the guest, etc. Are you going to offer some lenience to companies who have gotten a huge spike in charge backs just due to an increase time in support tickets? We are trying to find ways to just refund the guest where we know the hotel has closed, but there's no master list of that so we can't just blindly refund everybody

patio11 6y ago
I work at Stripe. Many companies in travel (and similarly affected industries) are having challenges shaped similarly to yours. There is a very active conversation in the industry about what we can do about the standard process for chargebacks to support this better. (Chargebacks were never designed to be a massively high-volume simultaneous event.) Concretely you could imagine some specific consequences of chargebacks. I don’t have anything specific that I can share as of this exact minute with respect to each of those concrete consequences, but we’re working on this very actively. A lot of this work requires coordination with other firms. Chargebacks are broadly adjudicated by banks with reference to the rules established by the card networks, so we have limited control over per-chargeback decisions, but the industry is moving quickly on trying to decide what to do about this sort of chargeback given the circumstances. As always, we’re in the corner of companies trying to do the right thing. As you get through this, if there’s specific things we can help on, please flag them to us; we can’t promise saying yes to every request but we can promise you’ll have our attention.
- notwhereyouare 6y ago
  Thanks for your response. We are more just concerned about being dropped over the large number of charge backs in a small period. So much so that we are actively implementing a new provider as backup so we aren’t stranded if we get cut off.

consultSKI 6y ago

love stripe, but you have a death spiral in your process. I tried to reactivate my account. no longer have the old domain. so I can't contact support because I can't log in. it takes WEEKS to get paid with a new account. after more than five years [on and off] with you, I would have hoped for a better process. #justSayin since you asked. p.s. i emailed this too.

edwinwee 6y ago
Hm, sorry about this. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I see what's going on?

stevoski 6y ago

Hey Patrick, It would be great if Stripe Checkout included VAT-related features: * Detect country and - if needed - add appropriate VAT * Allow customer to add a valid VAT number, so that when appropriate tax is not charged * Offer clear reporting on what VAT has been collected for each jurisdiction I realise this is a big, big can of worms. But that’s why we use Stripe, right? For help handling that big can of worms that is international payment collections. :)

jackerman 6y ago
Josh here from the Stripe Checkout team. We're actively thinking about VAT-related features for Checkout. We'd love to chat; drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com
- stevoski 6y ago
  Josh, I appreciate you being receptive. But I've been asking Stripe for this since 2015. I don't know what info I can possibly offer you that you surely haven't heard from tons of customers over the years.
the-real-jap 6y ago
My company uses Chargebee as the subscription management layer (between stripe and our systems; they perform charging, billing and dunning for us, and also offer us a slick interface to hand out rebates and the like); they are able to at least determine the correct VAT amount for European customers (based on IP/asking the user). It's not free though, but I'm happy we are able to focus on our product instead of those things.

mkchoi212 6y ago

Find it really cool that the cofounder is directly reaching out to the developer community. Keep up the great work :)

pendingHN 6y ago

I'll send an email later as well, but I just wanted to raise that we are very concerned about our ability to continue integrating with Stripe. We've loved using Stripe for years, but given all of the uncertainty surrounding the tipsi-stripe project and the lack of an official stripe solution for React-Native, we're questioning how wise it is to be dependant on Stripe. I've seen others speaking to your staff on twitter and github about this, so I don't think we're alone. There must be hundreds (thousands?) of apps using this integration and all of them have been stuck in limbo for many months now. We would like to enable SCA, but the beta version of this project doesn't seem to have documentation beyond a few comments in github issues here and there, and the discord is almost solely populated by people asking how to use the beta and no one can answer them. I think whichever of the major payment platforms extends a hand out to the React-Native community first, with a confident, well documented official project, will be celebrated and would cement themselves as THE payment platform for people using React-Native.

ctraganos 6y ago
@pendingHN @chris_trag from Stripe here. The React Native situation is very much top-of-mind and we're working on the right lasting solution for your business and the RN community. When we had submitted the PRs to provide 3D Secure / SCA support, we had not anticipated the work would be left on an experimental branch for this amount of time. This spring we've been able to connect with the previous maintainers and understand the business situation behind this community repo. With all things open source, we want to be mindful of projects that are run by the community while determining which key libraries not in active development/maintenance. All this to say, peace of mind and clarity on how React Native devs can implement Stripe with ease is a priority and I apologize for the limbo you've been in. Thank you so much for your patience as we pull the remediation together. Happy to chat directly as well -> trag at stripe dot com

dalex00 6y ago

From sw development perspective how do you create the public documentation and internal system process documentation? Tools, process and responbilities would be interesting for me for such complex business modell. Hopefully someone can shine a light..

lllmarclll 6y ago

What an excellent answer

AnssiH 6y ago

Probably not news to Stripe and not a priority, but just thought I'd mention it: The only reason we are not using Stripe is the lack of support for Finnish payment methods - around 70% of our retail website customers pay using the local "bank buttons" and 10% use local mobile payments (MobilePay, Pivo).

chrisjarvis 6y ago

Using Stripe Checkout (where you create a stripe session on ur server and redirect the client to stripe to complete payment and then listen for a Webhook that says the checkout session was completed) was so amazingly easy to setup and use. My app that uses it will up and running soon, Stripe has been a pleasure to use so far!

windlep 6y ago

My biggest two issues: 1) Stripe docs are inaccurate. They frequently don't work exactly as they describe for given subscription workflows. Sometimes an API call is entirely wrong, sometimes it doesn't return the data the docs indicate, and sometimes the arguments it describes just doesn't exist. (Yes, I've ensured I'm using the latest API version in use). 2) The docs have no changelog. There's an API changelog that indicates when API's change, there's nothing indicating when entire chunks of the documentation change on the website, along with the recommended way to integrate. The most obvious example of this is that the subscription workflow docs got a huge makeover in the past year (sometime), with some really great flowchart diagrams. But back to point #1, some of the API calls listed here are not actually valid. If I've just missed the changelog for the website docs, please point me in the right direction. :) For reference, I'm using Node at the moment, but I've also integrated with Python, and there were breaker bugs in those docs as well. I eventually end up reading the HTTP API docs, then going through the SDK's to see where they went wrong, or the docs went wrong.

switch11 6y ago

Patrick, good to see you responding I'd like to add a few points, especially those considering Stripe vs Paypal This: Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved. We are very thankful to Stripe because Paypal left us high and dry We found out they were calling up our customers and pretty much forcing them to do disputes They also locked our funds FOR SIX MONTHS If we did not have backup funds and if we did not have Stripe we literally would not be able to continue as a company Paypal basically have ZERO consideration of the fact that you are running a business and that your payment provider should not just randomly end the business arrangement Our dispute rate for the last $1.5 million processed through Stripe is roughly 0.3% whereas with Paypal it was considerably higher. I even have saved emails from our customers of Paypal asking them to open disputes even when they said they were happy and did not want to Even eBay stopped using Paypal, and switched to Adeyn consider how extreme things have to be if the company from which you were spun off as a separate company (eBay spun off Paypal), even they stop working with you Stripe is much, much better than Paypal Most importantly, it is much more dependable, much more small business and startup friendly, and developer first mentality Paypal always has the attitude of - We're big and we don't give two hoots about you Whereas Stripe they will always talk to you as a fellow human being * Stripe: The CEO is coming here to Hacker News and personally responding As are various members of the Stripe Team Paypal: Will freeze your account for no reason at all. Will not even respond. The lady on the phone will shout at you even though you are politely asking why account is frozen. Plus as a bonus they will freeze funds for SIX Months They froze funds equal to TWENTY TIMES the total disputes and refunds combined total from the Past 5 years. For SIX MONTHS

littlethings 6y ago
Awful. Happened to my friends too. The funniest part is, they still get away with it. But the consumers have choice and I am glad they are choosing Stripe over PP. Also, if anyone at PayPal reads it: screw you, I will never give you a damn cent.

larossmann 6y ago

Billing the vendor for refund fees is the biggest gripe I have. It is not only for the self-centered reason that it would affect my business – it is because it contributes to the consolidation of ecommerce to only a few select companies. It adds friction to consumer transactions with small businesses, causing consumers to become aggravated with these small businesses. It conditions consumers to believe it is easier to deal with large businesses that always seem to have a "cancel" button and easy-order-cancellation policies, opposed to the small businesses that just seem to make things hard and expensive for no good reason. This will contribute to the consolidation of ecommerce to a small number of multi-billion dollar players like Walmart, eBay, Amazon, etc. Allow me to explain: If someone makes a purchase of a $1500 ultrasonic cleaner from me, and then realizes they made a mistake, I now have to tell them there’s a $43.50 restocking fee, even if they call me 2 minutes after they place the order. This will leave a disgusting taste in the customer’s mouth, but I have to do it, because I can’t expose myself to a $43.50 fee for something I have zero control over. That customer may eventually notice that Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, do not charge such a fee. The customer has no idea why – they just know dealing with Amazon means less friction. The customer will now utilize Amazon more. Many will say that this is a dumb gripe. “If you don’t like it go somewhere else!” PayPal instituted this policy as well. They backed down temporarily after people made a stink about it, but months later continued forward with the policy. I currently use a merchant services provider that does not implement these fees, but for how long? My time in my industry has taught me that companies will often wait for one “outlier” to make controversial reforms to their platform/products before doing it themselves. Whether it is gluing the battery inside of a cellphone, or adding strange fees to transactions. Once a profitable, anti-consumer move succeeds with the company not going out of business, it emboldens other firms to do the same. My merchant services provider doesn’t charge this fee. Yet. But they saw Stripe charge it, and get away with it. They saw PayPal charge it and have another more profitable quarter. The outrage lasted a week, the increased profit lasted forever. “Gee, it isn’t a business killer after all. Maybe we should do it too!” will come up in corporate boardrooms across America. Then, we’re left with a landscape where the only companies left in ecommerce who can offer customers friction-free order cancellations are Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Who wants that? Yes, people can say “just absorb the fee if you don’t want your customers to be mad at you.” How? I am already competing as a dude with no outside financing with a trillion dollar company – I’m winning if I am making any sales at all! Now I’m expected to compete on price when I have to absorb fees when customers cancel an order? Let’s say you manage to claw your way into a market by offering a better product, or after sales service on that product to the point where you can compete with Amazon. That is a miracle in and of itself. To then have to deal with a minefield of additional charges that your competitor doesn’t have to is just another nail in the coffin of small-business ecommerce. I find it awful, and I protest using these services. I cut my exposure to paypal by about 95% and dodged a bullet in not signing up for stripe. I suggest the same to my listenership anytime someone brings up or mentions a merchant services provider that I know charges this fee. Even if they say it won't affect their business much because they do not deal with lots of cancellations, it is the greater implication I make them aware of. No one wants a market where the only companies with a free "cancel order" button on their site are eBay and Amazon. Scott Galloway also has a lot of excellent content with arguments on breaking up Amazon. Whether or not one agrees with his solutions or assessments of the problems Amazon creates and how to fix them – it is clear that they are dominating the race. I am not suggesting that we hold Amazon back – just that we don’t purposely trip companies doing their best to keep up.

misrab 6y ago

Would love Stripe to handle bank transfers as a payment method! Many of our customers prefer this method over card payments. Then Stripe would fully cover our payment use-case; I'd love to use Stripe alone for payment, analytics and security. Right now we can't :(

sadovmychyi 6y ago

Any plans to make IDR currency into zero decimals so we can charge more than ~$64? Right now you cannot charge more than a million in any currency (which is reasonable) but IDR still has decimals.

m11a 6y ago

I'm late, so you probably won't see this (might shoot you an email with this same thought.), but I want to echo a piece of feedback I sent to you last year (and the year before I think): Faster checkout. And improved trust (somehow). I hear you folks acquired fast.co which seems to be a step in this direction. Entering card details on every site is problematic. Some customers are still worried about it and prefer to use PayPal. Indeed, when I offer both as an option, and make clear Stripe payments go via Stripe and we don't see details, about 80% of people choose to pay with PayPal. Stripe Checkout, being on your platform and not our sites, seems to be a step in the right direction. I'd also like to see faster payments. My opinion: checkout takes too long. Sites making people create accounts, go through 4 pages and then enter card is bad. -------- I think, honestly, integrating fast.co into Stripe and making it highly encouraged is the future. Go a step further and encourage sites to stop making users create accounts. SSO-style system, perhaps, but easy to integrate. Authentication is a pain for me as a customer on sites - I have too many accounts and it drains a lot of time combined. I really think your company has the power to make a difference to this problem.

vinniejames 6y ago

When will you bring back crypto payments?

sholladay 6y ago

I need destination subscriptions - subscribe a customer on my platform to a plan on my platform and share some of the revenue with a Connect account. The workarounds needed to solve this use case are very clunky.