23 ms·

Stripe Payment Links

988 points by joeyespo 5y ago

throwkeep 5y ago
Gumroad? https://twitter.com/shl/status/1397254513627705345 https://twitter.com/shl/status/1397254513627705345
- pgrote 5y ago
  It always amazes me when things like this happen. If you look at the comments on this post you'll see people responding as if this a terrific new idea/frontier. Others respond with links to existing solutions as you did; Gumroad was my first thought, too. And to me, this is one of the main benefits of hackernews. I don't know everything, I don't know everything available, so I take value from everyone adding the options they know about.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    This IS terrific news if you are using Stripe and want to stick with them as your one payment solution.
    - loceng 5y ago
      Until adoption increases enough and they decide they can milk customers even more?
      - frakkingcylons 5y ago
        Really? What has stripe done in the past to make it feel like they’re being greedy? Besides, nobody is using stripe because it’s the cheapest option.
        kennywinker 5y ago
        > What has stripe done in the past Take VC funding. I'm being glib, but honestly - it feels like every large vc funded company is actually some many-layered plan to take over existing markets, and then exploit their new monopoly
        tjs8rj 5y ago
        That’s exactly the point of VC largely - no really, that’s no secret at all. VCs want unicorns. To get that big you often have to be the biggest in the space or big enough with enough moat to effectively be a monopoly. Monopoly status is the goal
        kennywinker 5y ago
        So why is VC funding considered a Good Thing® and actively promoted as the way businesses should be created, when literally everybody agrees monopolies are a bad thing?
        barsonme 5y ago
        Because everybody wants to be a monopoly but nobody wants to be monopolized.
        tjs8rj 5y ago
        Not sure what you mean. It’s definitely glamorized, just like working a high paying finance job is (but I don’t think many would call Wall Street ethical or moral). Lots of people want to be VC backed because it’s great for you, but it’s more complicated whether it’s great for anyone else
        chrischattin 5y ago
        They stopped refunding payment processing fees on refunds, for one.
        frakkingcylons 5y ago
        Long after other comparable gateways had already stopped refunding those too.
- giarc 5y ago
  Gumroad deposits to Paypal, Stripe deposits to bank account. Seems like a big difference, no?
  - Kye 5y ago
    Gumroad deposits to bank accounts, but it might be regional. I have a section for ACH in my setup page. You can optionally also add a PayPal account to accept PayPal.
    - __float 5y ago
      According to https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-page https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-pa..., it depends on Stripe's availability for ACH payouts.
    - giarc 5y ago
      I was just referring to the marketing copy by SHL in the tweet.
  - aazaa 5y ago
    Gumroad also deposits to bank account.
    - giarc 5y ago
      I was simply referring to the marketing copy in the linked Tweet.
  - swyx 5y ago
    more than that. Gumroad also acts as a merchant of record (much much cleaner for international and EU/US taxes), provides social proof (reviews) and a discovery marketplace, together with a no code frontend with fulfilment (aka it hosts your files) Stripe has a ways to go but certainly can clone these if they wish)
    - swyx 5y ago
- treelovinhippie 5y ago
  If the YC-adjacent scene stopped funding boring incremental startups maybe we'd dig our way out of the Great Stagnation. Gumroad is something that should be a 0% fee opensource developer component, not an entire company. The YC Facebook feed has been depressing lately: $6M funding for one of those links-on-a-page startups, $50M funding for a startup that wants to sell Pokemon cards on a livestream. The VCs are fuelling stagnation by funding these boring inconsequential projects.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    Just look at the Show HN - YC batch companies, none of them are doing anything remotely groundbreaking or risky. A ton of them are solving minor workflow problems trying to skim shit off the top.
    - treelovinhippie 5y ago
      Alas the HN echo-chamber ensures these points are pushed out of the bubble. Why is YC funding this sort of shit? https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator-profiles https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator...
      - sebmellen 5y ago
        Unfortunate that you're being downvoted for raising cogent points. I do think companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Ginko Bioworks, etc. are doing pretty neat stuff. Even if these businesses don't seem groundbreaking, they clearly are, somehow. But the recent batches of YC startups seem disappointingly... competitive. As in the Thiel-ian sense of not doing much fundamentally different from other players in the market. I wonder if this could be attributed to Paul Graham stepping back from the front lines.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stanislavb 5y ago
  Gumroad is in for a bit of direct competition by a behemoth. I'm sure they won't have good sleep in the coming months.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    I don't think so. Gumroad has a product delivery platform, where stripe only handles payment. I recently evaluated stripe vs gumroad for a product, and went with gumroad because they make getting the digital product to your customer VERY easy, while stripe leaves it all up to you
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Aren’t these quite different things with similar copy? Gumroad seems to me to offer a way to eg sell copies of your pdf. This stripe service seems to be a way to make a link saying “that will be $79.82 please” and collect payment (and maybe some other details). I.e. Gumroad provides some online store for a single digital product and stripe offer a way to collect money for anything but they don’t handle actually giving you the thing. Obviously there is some overlap but the pitch is different. Edit: maybe I’m actually wrong and these are really similar. The thing I described above is more like an invoice for which this maybe isn’t suited (pay an invoice once/periodically but these links may be hit many times). So I’m not really sure now
- senbarryobama 5y ago
  This is Insta story/reels all over again!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
grenoire 5y ago
Mollie has been providing this service under the Plink [1] brand name for quite a while, I was looking for something to get my clients onboard with Stripe without using Billing (main reason being Mollie having difficulty serving corporate US cards from time to time). Nice move, simple product, extremely useful! [1] https://useplink.com/en/ https://useplink.com/en/
- the-dude 5y ago
  There are other niche PSPs who have been doing exactly this for over a decade.
- vincentkriek 5y ago
  For context, in the Netherlands (where Mollie was founded) sending payment requests by text took off when one bank set up a service geared for consumers that provided this (Tikkie [1]). Mobile payments were common place before this, so customers were already used to this. Taking this to the next level, by having businesses use this is a great and logical step. [1] https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/internet-and-mobile/apps/Tikkie/index.html https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/internet-and-mobile/apps/...
  - grenoire 5y ago
    Implemented a small app this, such a clean API. Love it and hope it goes pan-European. Although I think it may be the Dutch money culture that got it to blow up so bi, ha!
    - vincentkriek 5y ago
      I'm curious, what is the "Dutch money culture"? I haven't used paper money in ages, is that specifically Dutch or are you hinting at something else?
      - markus92 5y ago
        The "I send you a tikkie for this .25ct tomato paste can"-meme.
thinkafterbef 5y ago
TillyPay? https://tillypay.com/ https://tillypay.com/
throxwaway98123 5y ago
This is absolutely the worst news for Shopify. A very large portion of SMBs want to sell a handful of things without the overhead of maintaining and paying over the top for a e-commerce cms. This plus social media will be a huge win for a lot of businesses
- zyang 5y ago
  Shopify is fine. They have a nice eco-system of devs and integrated apps. Gumroad should be worried.
  - throxwaway98123 5y ago
    Shopify is fine is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Shopify is the 2008 equivalent in the tech world. Hugely overvalued, no secret sauce (pretty web fronts that are powered by stripe) Shopifys moat is nonexistent.
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      Shopify's moat is its ecosystem of developers and apps, for many of the same reasons WordPress still powers 39.5% of all websites in 2021. Shop Pay also provides many of the same benefits of Stripe -- global one-click payment across all their stores and more. I run into Shopify sites while shopping all the time and am always pleasantly surprised that I don't have to fill out anything to check out, it already knows me. Then those orders magically show up in the Shop app on my phone for order status and delivery tracking. Here's a screenshot. I did not make an account with any of these completely independent websites. Yet I checked out on all of them without typing my address or payment info. And all my orders appear here with tracking. https://i.imgur.com/D4XfvnJ.png https://i.imgur.com/D4XfvnJ.png
      - throxwaway98123 5y ago
        Wordpress is a free product. Shopify is not. Shopify built a good ecom cms and they’ll be right for some companies, but they’ve also cornered themselves as that company that makes ecom software. Remember Shopify POS? Me either. Anyways, consumer trends change. The way people buy online will change. There’s a future where ecom websites are basically the back catalogue of the future.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
I love watching Stripe going upmarket with e-comm streamlining offerings (links, subscriptions), the foresight shows (payment commodification eventually, Value Add Is The Way).
- jackerman 5y ago
  Thank you for the kind words! We're always working to improve our products; feedback welcome!
ds 5y ago
I built something like this way back in 2008, since paypal let you set a IPN dynamically. Was basically a pastebin behind a paywall. I found it incredibly difficult to market, but I think I was doing it wrong because gumroad took off many years later https://www.redferret.net/tiny-checkout-very-cool-little-online-checkout-service/ https://www.redferret.net/tiny-checkout-very-cool-little-onl... https://web.archive.org/web/20090227044608/http://www.tinycheckout.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227044608/http://www.tinych...
londons_explore 5y ago
So how does this differ from PayPal pay buttons from the 2000's?
tmikaeld 5y ago
Same as https://www.plugnpaid.com https://www.plugnpaid.com ?
yannoninator 5y ago
This. is. going. to. be. HUGE! Lots of companies Stripe has replaced because of this. I can see new areas of businesses being launched because of how easy Stripe has made it to be paid online, all with no-code! No more third parties or complex developer integrations or a cut, only get paid with a link with Stripe, That's it! I welcome this!
- throxwaway98123 5y ago
  Yep yep yep. The things this will enable are endless. This is truly headless e-commerce.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  That's the promise. However, I recently set up an e-commerce website for my wife. I was actually a bit shocked to discover that whilst Stripe's offerings are like 95% of the way there, that missing 5% means you can't take advantage of said offering at all. 1. I setup Stripe Checkout for subscriptions and thought I was good to go. However, my wife wanted to take sign-ups in anticipation of a set launch date in the future i.e. don't invoice until a specific date. Nope, no can do, the "billing_cycle_anchor" property can't be set with a checkout session. You can add a trial period, but then Stripe's Checkout UI goes out of it's way to emphasise that you're giving the customer a free trial. Which is inaccurate and the incorrect messaging would likely run us afoul of consumer law in Australia. So I had to ditch Stripe Checkout entirely and move to Stripe Elements. Then I realised another painful edge case. You can't set "billing_cycle_anchor" more than a month away (with monthly billing). So I did end up having to set a free trial period, but at least I could hide this information so my UI wasn't misleading customers into thinking they were getting something free when they weren't. 2. You can't create a trial period for less than 48 hours. So there's an edge case I need to handle as we approach the launch date i.e. I need to use "billing_cycle_anchor" sometimes, and free trial periods other times. 3. You can't attach shipping costs to subscriptions, at least, not without manually editing invoices i.e. somewhat reinventing the subscription logic. 4. You can't attach more than one coupon to a subscription. So you end up either manually messing with invoices, or creating weird amalgamation coupons. The latter seems simple, but it's not because if you want to offer a launch discount (for the first invoice) and indefinite free shipping, this simply cannot be represented using Stripe's coupon functionality. 5. Subscriptions don't have shipping addresses, only customers do. So if a customer wants to have multiple subscriptions delivering to different addresses then Stripe's Customer Portal offering becomes fairly useless. So we need to have our own UI and storage for shipping addresses for each subscription. Basically I found that I needed to reinvent a bunch of stuff Stripe was already doing, in order to get that extra 5%. In which case I could almost as easily go with a different payment processor. I am very much looking forward to when Stripe has time to iron out the kinks. Because wowee it was easy to get Stripe Checkout up and running. I really thought it was smooth sailing... but then it wasn't.
alberth 5y ago
Conversational Commerce Question: for those who run e-commerce sites, how common do you see Conversation Commerce gaining use by buyers? E.g. significant portion of sales, small portion of sales, gaining adoption, declining adoption? Just curious since the demo on Stripe's site is exactly this use case where someone is provided the link to purchase via a chatbot.
jordhy 5y ago
So Gumroad is dead???
- ergocoder 5y ago
  Different targets. And there can be multiplayers. Gumroad is essentially a one-person company. Maybe they are impacted. I doubt they will be dead.
korijn 5y ago
Are they setting foot outside USA yet? Just wondering.
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Stripe has set foot in 44 countries—with many more countries on the roadmap. https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
- iou 5y ago
  Yes. https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global Available in 38 countries, previewing in 6
endisneigh 5y ago
This is pretty great, but I think some people are overestimating the significance of this - PayPal.me has existed for a while and it hasn't exactly killed off small payment providers.
- pbreit 5y ago
  paypal.me is a bit different. But the original PayPal "Buy Now" buttons (from 2000) are similar.
- nickjj 5y ago
  Yeah, for the last few years there's also been Zelle (at least in the US). This is IMO a killer service because all you need is the person's email address or phone number, there's no fees, it's really fast and it's a feature built into most major banks' dashboard so there's no sign up process. It's like the best possible thing you could ask for, but small payment providers in the US still exist. It's really handy for the use case of sending or accepting infrequent 1 to 1 payments (invoices, referral payouts, etc.). It supports recurring payments too.
pc 5y ago
(Stripe cofounder.) While there are lots of antecedents (this is, after all, just a checkout page with a URL), and even though this was substantially inspired by the growth of the no-code ecosystem[0], the thing that's interesting to me about the payment link "space" is that it's a use case that really took off in other markets first -- Nigeria, India, Philippines, etc. I suspect that staying abreast of important new patterns emerging outside US/Europe will become more important for many businesses in the years ahead... there are a lot of legacy assumptions being questioned. And feedback very welcome on our Payment Links product itself! [0] We were excited to have Ben Tossell, one of the original no-coders, as one of our beta users: https://twitter.com/bentossell/status/1397246339898093568 https://twitter.com/bentossell/status/1397246339898093568
- cyral 5y ago
  Not related to payment links... but I would love to see Stripe take on handling in app purchases. (basically a webhook and management layer over the terrible native APIs) Companies like RevenueCat are halfway there but have nowhere as nice of an API or dashboard as Stripe. I run a cross platform (web/ios/android) app and would love to do payments all under one platform (Stripe, that is). Apple and Google subscriptions have so many complexities and edge cases that companies like RevenueCat and Qonversion are enormously helpful, but they themselves have many bugs and issues that I've ran into.
  - jeiting 5y ago
    Would love to hear how we can improve the API to make you not want Stripe to do it better. :) Obviously, Stripe is the gold standard and I think we have a hard time, but we're hoping to improve the developer experience even more this year.
    - cyral 5y ago
      My main issue is how the webhooks sometimes give incorrect info, which has led to many customer complains when their subscription gets messed up by some edge case that I would expect to be abstracted away by RevenueCat but isn't. For example, when I implemented the PRODUCT_CHANGE event I expected it would notify me of the new product, but that is not the case on Android which led to bugs with some customers. It turns out that only iOS sends the new_product_id, so it is impossible to know from this event what the new product should be to display it in the app. Since upgrades/downgrades are immediate on Android, it turns out that the solution was just to not handle that event on Android since the renewal event would override the product anyways. (but sometimes the events came out of order, which is what led to bugs when PRODUCT_CHANGE was after RENEWAL). There are a lot of cases where events in the dashboard are totally out of order and don't make sense, like showing a customer purchasing the lesser plan, then renewing for the upgraded plan, and then switching from the lesser to the upgraded plan 10 days later. How could that be possible? The switch should have been between the renewals, so it's very confusing to debug. I've been told that now the recommended approach is to ignore all the webhook data, and simply call the RevenueCat API to get the entitlement and subscription status - however I asked how to parse this into something meaningful and didn't get a good answer. I would like to know the users current entitlement, and the current subscription (which can be different than the entitlement). For example, if the user downgrades, their entitlement may still be the upgraded plan for a while, but the app should reflect that they are no longer subscribed, or that they are subscribed to a different plan. For the entitlement it is easy I think, just choose the highest entitlement level to use. For the subscription, maybe choosing the last renewed one would work? But there are so many complexities with downgrades, upgrades, crossgrades I don't know if that is true. The answer from support was basically that they didn't know, yet this is an absolute must for almost any app - there has to be a way to display what the user is currently paying (or not paying) for, linking out to the native UI is not an option as it's not user friendly and cannot be displayed cross platform (I want the website to also reflect what they are paying for). My big concern with this is also, why does the API supposedly return the correct data but the webhook doesn't? If I am calling the API 10ms after receiving the webhook, why can't the webhook just deliver correct data instead? Another current issue I discovered the other day was that grace periods are no longer working. The RevenueCat dashboard shows that they are getting a 7 day grace period (the expiration date in the dashboard is correct), yet in the webhooks I am getting the wrong expiration, one that is only a day away. Apparently this is due to a change by Google and a fix is (maybe?) on the way? But it caused a lot of issues that I didn't expect. Basically RevenueCat's promise is great, it has saved a ton of time but isn't quite there on fully abstracting all these native edge cases away, they crop up in the API occasionally, and the proposed fix to use the API instead of the webhook data is half baked when support has no idea how to actually parse it to get the current subscription that should be displayed to the user (in the case that they upgraded/downgraded and have more than one). I love the idea but I'm hesitant to recommend it to anyone because lately it's been causing a lot of headaches with customers having billing issues due to these inconsistencies.
mrtksn 5y ago
I quickly looked around but I couldn't get an idea on how Stripe handles the AML and similar complience stuff on this. There have been similar services for years now, one is especially popular among people who sell illegal items and services like IP TV for pirated premium sports channels since they can quickly create per order link that is disguised as selling hamster supplies or drilling heads. Shady transactions are never out of reach, I just stumbled upon on one here: https://twitter.com/charliehtweets/status/1396860850699395074 https://twitter.com/charliehtweets/status/139686085069939507... That's the interesting part of payment processors IMHO. Taking an order and making a transaction is a technical achievement maybe for a junior developer. It's a shame that the material on the business and legal side of these things is limited. Only engineers like sharing their ways :)
- vmception 5y ago
  The key thing to understand is the difference between the actual law, individual company's implementation of the actual law, individual company's policies that have nothing to do with the law and are just a shitty inconvenient business practice, and individual company's representatives that don't know the difference between any of that and just say any inconvenience or transaction limit is because of "anti money laundering compliance" Once you know, there is a lot you can do. But back to the actual law, AML is primarily the creation of a firewall between the physical bearer cash system and the electronic financial system conducted by banks and other financial intermediaries. Anything on the inside of the firewall has already passed AML, meaning that financial institutions and card processors can just assume AML has already occurred. Additionally, inside the firewall, some parts of the electronic financial system can be temporarily ostracized by sanctions. So the only check would be the OFAC list at that point to determine if you can accept payment or not. Compliance for a payment processor has nothing to do with detecting fraud and is pretty much just the OFAC list. So that's the answer. You wouldn't get an idea because there is nothing specific for them to do.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    > Compliance for a payment processor has nothing to do with detecting fraud and is pretty much just the OFAC list. I suspect that it's not that simple. I did some work for people in compliance, I have some idea on the work they do and it's not simply department of people simply checking against the OFAC list. I'm a bit familiar with banks and not with money processors though. I have seen the bank side of the relationship and they can be very nervous when working with payment processors that bring bad money(scammers, pyramid schemes, drug money, terrorism financing etc). I like the firewall concept but it feels incomplete. Stripe must be doing a lot of interesting work to not be the shady company that the banks don't like working with. If you have more concrete knowledge on the topic, what is the hard part of running money transaction service, I.E. money processor? Atomic book keeping is not the challenge keeping every kid on the block from starting a money processor business, I would guess.
newsbinator 5y ago
I can't test it: 1. I'm logged into Stripe's default dashboard 2. I go to https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links and press "Start Now" 3. I get redirected to a registration page 4. I press "Have an account? Sign in" 5. I get redirected to Stripe's default dashboard
- edwinwee 5y ago
  If you're logged into the Stripe Dashboard already, best to go to Products > Payment links. https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links (https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links was originally intended for new users, but we'll look into making that Start button better.)
renewiltord 5y ago
Is this Zapier-able? This is brilliant. Thank you!
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Yes: https://zapier.com/apps/stripe/integrations https://zapier.com/apps/stripe/integrations. Would suggest chatting with https://twitter.com/bentossell https://twitter.com/bentossell, who runs Makerpad (Zapier) and uses Payment Links!
NonEUCitizen 5y ago
Does this support limited inventory? e.g. I want to sell only one item for a certain SKU. If two people have the link, only the first person to purchase should succeed, while the 2nd person should get a "This item is no longer available" message instead of being charged.
- jackerman 5y ago
  Not yet, but this is something we're excited to build. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to tell you more.
  - dvdhnt 5y ago
    This is a use case we would have, too - the ability to, for example, create a unique payment link that can be used exactly once or for a specific customer.
raviisoccupied 5y ago
I absolutely love this. Last year during the pandemic, we were using Eventbrite to process payments for events we were running. The cash we were getting was keeping our business going, until they decided to change their policy regarding pay outs (presumably due to cash flow issues of their own). In the end we found that using Typeform with a Stripe integration was the best way to reliably and quickly transact with our customers, so I'm extremely pleased Stripe has released a no code checkout experience of their own. Really excited to use this. Thank you Stripe.
- jackerman 5y ago
  Awesome! Can't wait to hear your thoughts/feedback on Payment Links; feel free to reach out at jackerman@stripe.com
msencenb 5y ago
Are we able to create these via the API (specifically through Connect)? I'd love to dig a bit deeper into the docs on integrating with this, but haven't managed to find them yet.
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Not today, but a Payment Links API is coming soon. (Will shoot an email if you'd like to test it.)
  - msencenb 5y ago
    That would be awesome, thank you!
astlouis44 5y ago
Hey pc! Fellow startup founder here - we're creating a decentralized metaverse platform in WebGL, and I'm thinking this would be perfect as a easy-to-use payment system for creators and indie game devs to take payments in our ecosystem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
parhamn 5y ago
I'm in Mexico right now and the gif/video animation was in Spanish. A+ for polish.
- EastSmith 5y ago
  My language, plus my currency. Pretty good job.
flarg 5y ago
What about an mpesa for the Western world? Paying money to bricks and mortar merchants by entering a short code?
LordAtlas 5y ago
I've seen this feature on Indian payment gateway companies for years now, so I guess I'm not terribly excited. Is this truly a new thing in the US?
farazbabar 5y ago
I believe I patented this in 2016: https://patents.justia.com/patent/10664883 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10664883
- lostcolony 5y ago
  And you're posting it here because...why? If you think there's a legal issue, this, obviously, isn't the forum. If you want to tell people "I had this idea first!" this also isn't the forum; you're either wrong, or are pointing to the wrong thing (patents aren't particular readable or understandable); show us the thing you made.
  - farazbabar 5y ago
    Because I am excited that this idea got turned into a viable product. And what is wrong with sharing the excitement with my fellow nerds including the fact that I had this idea first? It is all about execution and kudos to stripe for taking this idea forward and turning into a viable product.
    - stevenhuang 5y ago
      Gumroad had this since 2011, 5 years before you filed your patent.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Then perhaps a comment along the lines of "This is really neat! I'm so glad to see someone else doing this; I originally patented something akin to it and then (never used it/did and here's the thing I built), and it's awesome to see continued development in this area". As it is, it's not clear what your intent is (hence my question). You aren't congratulating them. You aren't expressing excitement. To your credit, you also aren't claiming they're infringing, though it begins to approach it.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    > If you want to tell people "I had this idea first!" this also isn't the forum This is a good forum for it since it is for showing new products. If this violates a patent, I definitely want to know. If it doesn't, then there will be no problem, right?
agildehaus 5y ago
I wish there was a "donation links" feature similar to this, that supported recurring donations. There are a lot of companies like DonorBox that offer this but shave a decent percentage off the top of every donation which is hard on non-profits. PayPal has a donation link feature, but PayPal stinks in every possible other way.
- jackerman 5y ago
  We're excited to build donations support via Stripe Payment Links. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and I'll let you know as soon as it is live.
- rorygibson 5y ago
  Hi! Late to the party, but this is exactly the kind of problem that my startup, Trolley, solves. Warning: shameless plug. It's a no-code shopping cart that works with Stripe. We offer Donations that work as you describe. You could check it out - https://trolley.link https://trolley.link (you can email me direct at rg@trolley.link if you want to know anything more)
  - agildehaus 5y ago
    You take 2% off the top of what Stripe already takes. No different from DonorBox. You mention on your website that there are discounts for non-profits, but I assume it's not 100%. The idea is that if Stripe offers it, they won't take anything off what they already take.
gorgoiler 5y ago
1.4% doesn’t sound too bad. I believe chip and pin point of sale is .65% to .85%. What are MasterCard / Visa’s rates for online sales?
- mfkp 5y ago
  Which market are you in? In the US I'm seeing "Starts at 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge"
  - bjohnson225 5y ago
    Europe presumably where interchange fees are significantly lower than the US. I see: 1,4% + 0,25 € for European cards 2,9% + 0,25 € for non-European cards
  - AnssiH 5y ago
    In EU Stripe is 1.4% + €0.25 for European cards, 2.9% + €0.25 for foreign cards, https://stripe.com/en-fi/pricing https://stripe.com/en-fi/pricing. There have been no recent changes to this.
  - gorgoiler 5y ago
    I’m seeing the UK rate on Stripe’s site and the comparison is with Barclaycard’s UK POS debit rates.
- MinorTom 5y ago
  + 25ct is pretty bad for EU cards and stripe does not support any other payment methods (important for the European market). I recommend you consider other PSPs like Adyen (a stripe clone; ~1% + 10ct) or Mollie, though I have tried neither.
akomtu 5y ago
A similar idea, but for periodic donations. Sites offer "subscription links" that get a share of your fixed donation budget per month, meaning that if you designate 50 usd per month for donations, all those you're donating to will have to split 50 usd. In addition to that, stripe lets you kick out any subscription from the list. Stripe can also aggregate these micropayments to reduce visa/ACH/whatever fees.
RikNieu 5y ago
I just wish I could use regular Stripe. :'(
ecommerceguy 5y ago
We'll try this in lieu of PayPal invoices since those have become a pita.
samblr 5y ago
Hey Patrick, this is cool. Is payment link creation available as an API ? That would change everything
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Coming soon! Could you email us and we'll let you know once it's available? jackerman@stripe.com + edwin@stripe.com
- paymentsstack 5y ago
  https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout
dakial1 5y ago
We used this link model in Brazil (custom made) for a client that has a B2B2C platform where vendors (shop owners for a specific industry) use the client's platform as an endless aisle option. We had a challenge for the payment side because: - the payment needed to be to our client and not the vendor (to avoid double taxation); - integrating to the POS machines of more than 100K vendors was unfeasible; - The client wouldn't trust typing credit card info into the vendors computer/tablet/mobile. So the solution was to use a link that could be send (whatsapp, sms) or read (QR Code), that would take the client to a checkout and payment secure site to finish the transaction. With mobile wallets penetration increasing we can make more sophisticated solutions where the link would connect directly to the wallet. But for now we are working with link>payment.
- redindian75 5y ago
  How is the link generated? So basically it is a deep link into the clients checkout page? Each product gets its own link? do u have a demo somewhere?
  - jackerman 5y ago
    Each product gets its own Payment Link. Jump into the Stripe Dashboard and give it a try today: https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links Here's a quick video walkthrough as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH78KUu4Jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH78KUu4Jk
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - redindian75 5y ago
      Thanks... But I meant his custom solution he made for his client - not Stripe Paymentlinks :)
  - dakial1 5y ago
    Unfortunately I can't share a demo or docs as this is NDA work we did for the client (and the commerce is still in alpha). But basically you're right. We would create a new checkout page (for the link) that would show the items of the cart (through the Commerce Platform API) and with the credit card fields shown (that would be later sent to the gateway). The link is for the checkout, so you'd have only one per cart/client and it has a timed session.
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soheil 5y ago
The significance of this is that now it is officially rubber-stamped by Stripe to just have a payment form on a website with shallow content (ie. no products or services). Send a link to get paid even if your product isn't launched yet, is what this is all about.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  The danger of this is that the rubber-stamp of Stripe may turn to a stamp to avoid if this becomes infamous for shady transactions
t7s 5y ago
Any chance of expanding this to be similar to PayPal add to cart?
gmcquistin 5y ago
This looks great! Will it be possible to create a link on a backend application and have all the frontend handled by Stripe?
- jackerman 5y ago
  We're excited to build an API for Payment Links soon. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to add you to the early access beta when we launch!
Androider 5y ago
Hate to be a party pooper, but what about Sales Tax handling?
- amzans 5y ago
  I'm also interested in this, and someone recently shared this with me: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar Apparently Stripe's acquisition of TaxJar is meant to expand their offerings in sales tax compliance. From the article: As the latest addition to Stripe’s revenue platform, TaxJar will help businesses automate tasks such as: - Providing accurate sales tax rates at checkout, tied to the exact street address of the customer. - Automatically submitting tax returns to local jurisdictions and remitting the sales tax collected. - Producing local jurisdiction reports to show sales and sales tax collected—not only for each state, but for relevant counties, cities, and other special jurisdictions. - Evaluating a company’s products and intelligently suggesting the right product tax code.
  - jackerman 5y ago
    We have a number of exciting tax-related launches with Stripe coming soon. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to give you early access.
    - c64b003acb3e0e2 5y ago
      "exciting" tax-related ... You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. ;)
  - wilg 5y ago
    This sounds great! We switched to Paddle (https://paddle.com/ https://paddle.com/) so we didn't have to do tax compliance ourselves. Might switch back...
    - jackerman 5y ago
      Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to give you a sneak peak about some cool taxes-related features we're launching very soon.
saltedonion 5y ago
Can someone tldr what PayPal has been doing for the past half decade. While startups has been eating their lunch.
fukmbas 5y ago
I'll pretty much never trust this. Hard telling what's a scam
e_commerce 5y ago
Please reduce fees
foolfoolz 5y ago
I got scammed on a page like this recently through paypal. The page showed up on google shopping. It had the right picture and text. They mailed me one sock instead of the ~$100 item i wanted. luckily paypal refunded me but this was not a great experience
collaborative 5y ago
Stripe 1 - Paypal 0 I surely will be looking into this as Paypal fees are way more expensive
- poxrud 5y ago
  PayPal has had this for years with paypal.me
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paymentsstack 5y ago
What is unique to this over what Square as already done:https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout
mixcocam 5y ago
I'm going to set this up for one of my products tomorrow. There doesn't seem to be a way to request delivery information though. Hope I'm wrong.
- edwinwee 5y ago
  There is! When creating a link, just check "Collect customers' addresses."
slig 5y ago
Is there a way to automate emailing the user an ebook or any other digital good?
- jackerman 5y ago
  Yes! We've built a Zapier integration that'll help you do just that. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to share further details with you.
nfoz 5y ago
Awesome feature. The first thing that comes to mind for me is fraud. Most obviously, what guarantees are in place that when I go to one of these links, that the seller company is who they say they are? I assume Stripe audits their customers and, for example, reviews the seller logo that's displayed to make sure it isn't misleading. But also, does Stripe give the seller any analytics about who (or how often) people are going to their sales link, even if they don't make a purchase? thanks :)
- edwinwee 5y ago
  When a seller creates a Stripe account to use Payment Links, they go through the same review processes (and face the same stringent regulations from card networks and banks) as any seller who creates a Stripe account to integrate our Payments API directly with their website. They will be rejected by Stripe if they violate our terms of service (i.e., if they're fraudulent). Sellers will be able to see if the buying process is started when a payment link is clicked: either through the Stripe Dashboard or through the API by listening for `payment_intent.created`.
  - nfoz 5y ago
    Cool, thanks for the clarification! My only suggestion would be to maybe put the name of the seller in the URL, that way you can see something about who you'd be paying before clicking the link. I'm not sure that helps any particular threat model but it would make me feel better about even navigating to the stripe link somehow.
  - nfoz 5y ago
    Also, I recommend adding a "Report" button to the page, so that would-be buyers can report if they arrived at a checkout page through fraud/misrepresentation.
purple_ferret 5y ago
meh, maybe this is big outside the us, but people just ask to be paid on Venmo/Cashapp around here. I don't see people wanting to share their numbers so they can get a clickable link.
- powerlogic31 5y ago
  I'm from the Philippines and we mostly use GCASH which is like Venmo for sending money. The biggest problem is the limit if you have a legitimate business. I think that's where stripe link is useful. "Sending money" is different from "Buying something" from a government standpoint.
lenitabinol 5y ago
Glad I am long $PSTH
symlinkk 5y ago
2.9% + $.30 is insane. I can’t believe such a simple product is apparently worth so much.
- CallMeMarc 5y ago
  I guess this one’s going on Visa/Mastercard/etc as they are the ones charging the most of these fees[0]. [0] https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card-processing-fees-costs-america https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...
- poxrud 5y ago
  Even more expensive if you're in Canada and want to accept USD.
shml_onathan 5y ago
The page's hero animation is so good though
lvl100 5y ago
I wanted to use Stripe last year but ended up opting for Square. One thing I really would like (and a feature that would make me switch) is a more generalized way to set pricing structure and other options.
justinmcp 5y ago
Ok, so time to abandon https://www.honorarium.cc/ https://www.honorarium.cc/ ? At least it happened before all the polishing began...
o_____________o 5y ago
How do you handle a merchant in, say, Mexico and a customer in the US?
galaxyLogic 5y ago
I'm still trying to figure out a simple way to sell a DIGITAL product. How to prevent anybody who buys a copy to make a thousand copies from it and share them on the internet. Is there such a way?
- likeabbas 5y ago
  Isn’t that what NFTs are for? https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-boom-collectors-shell-out-crypto/ https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-boom-collectors-shell-out-c...
  - Vadoff 5y ago
    Nope, NFTs are for claiming that you own the “original” digital work. It doesn’t prevent people from copying and sharing it.
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      So NFTs are basically something like copyright? Only the person having the copyright can sell it. So why do we need NFTs if we can own a copyright to some digital creation, and can sell that copyright as well?
- cheeze 5y ago
  Depends on the digital product, but usually you're looking at something like a license key and DRM. If someone is determined enough, they _will_ distribute thousands of copies of it though.
- folli 5y ago
  I recently came across Fastspring, they let you generate a license key upon purchase. I'm not using it myself, but it might be helpful https://fastspring.com/docs/fulfillments/ https://fastspring.com/docs/fulfillments/
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    Seems interesting, thanks
tndl 5y ago
SumUp's had something like this for a while now, US included: https://sumup.com/remote-payments-usa/ https://sumup.com/remote-payments-usa/
swyx 5y ago
In case it helps anyone, I've just put up a 3 minute demo of Stripe Payment Links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLNFJNoL9e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLNFJNoL9e8 (as a user of Stripe Checkout it was the natural next step)
folli 5y ago
Off topic: can anyone recommend a Stripe alternative that's a bit less risk averse than stripe is? I'm trying to test the water with a service in the crypto space (it's not about selling/buying cryptocurrency, but about automating some stuff regarding blockchain interaction). I got declined by Stripe based on their terms of service (i.e. don't mention the word blockchain). I'm currently looking into payrexx (however seems way less polished than Stripe), and I've heard about Ayden and Mollie (don't know if they are equally conservative). Any recommendations?
- sidcool 5y ago
  Sorry in advance, I don't want to sound snobby, but did you mean 'risk averse'?
  - folli 5y ago
    Yes, thank you Swype keyboard
- runeks 5y ago
  I don’t know about their terms of service, but I’ve heard good things about Adyen. They also support more payment methods than Stripe: https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods.
  - qw 5y ago
    Adyen has payment links too
  - schmidmobile 5y ago
    The Paylink solution from Payrexx is very sophisticated and offers more options than almost any other solution. See: https://www.payrexx.com/en/products/paylink/ https://www.payrexx.com/en/products/paylink/
aj_nikhil 5y ago
Razorpay has had this for a while . Stripe seems to be catching up.
cre832982 5y ago
Do you have any plans to open a service in S.Korea?
cre832982 5y ago
Do you have any plans to open a service in Korea? I'm looking forward to it.
uncleBobby 5y ago
How PayNowLink can create Stripe links without using an API ?
boraoztunc 5y ago
It would be great to have a dedicated page to display all the products, that have been created by Stripe Payment Links. So when I shared the link, customer also can have an option to navigate to that page and view other products, available right there to purchase. https://buy.stripe.com/dR6cOd9RJ8KS8nufYZ https://buy.stripe.com/dR6cOd9RJ8KS8nufYZ For this demo link for example, I wanted to see other stickers in "Stripe Sticker Shop". May be this more of a e-commerce feature, rather than a payment/checkout solution, but after all it is all about selling and buying.
cblconfederate 5y ago
How do people handle taxes/accounting/receipts and invoicing for this kind of stuff. At least in the EU it would be a nightmare if you rely on a bunch of such links to sell.
- dbbk 5y ago
  Just use Paddle
CyanDeparture 5y ago
This is off topic, but all of Stripes landing pages are a masterpiece of web design. Just so pleasent to browse.
ElectricMind 5y ago
Someone told me there will be free cupcakes along with this announcements :(
bbtd 5y ago
Hey folks! This is great! Do you have plans to launch in more latin american countries other than BR and MX?

988 points by joeyespo 5y ago

throwkeep 5y ago

Gumroad? https://twitter.com/shl/status/1397254513627705345 https://twitter.com/shl/status/1397254513627705345

pgrote 5y ago
It always amazes me when things like this happen. If you look at the comments on this post you'll see people responding as if this a terrific new idea/frontier. Others respond with links to existing solutions as you did; Gumroad was my first thought, too. And to me, this is one of the main benefits of hackernews. I don't know everything, I don't know everything available, so I take value from everyone adding the options they know about.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  This IS terrific news if you are using Stripe and want to stick with them as your one payment solution.
  - loceng 5y ago
    Until adoption increases enough and they decide they can milk customers even more?
    - frakkingcylons 5y ago
      Really? What has stripe done in the past to make it feel like they’re being greedy? Besides, nobody is using stripe because it’s the cheapest option.
      - kennywinker 5y ago
        > What has stripe done in the past Take VC funding. I'm being glib, but honestly - it feels like every large vc funded company is actually some many-layered plan to take over existing markets, and then exploit their new monopoly
        tjs8rj 5y ago
        That’s exactly the point of VC largely - no really, that’s no secret at all. VCs want unicorns. To get that big you often have to be the biggest in the space or big enough with enough moat to effectively be a monopoly. Monopoly status is the goal
        kennywinker 5y ago
        So why is VC funding considered a Good Thing® and actively promoted as the way businesses should be created, when literally everybody agrees monopolies are a bad thing?
        barsonme 5y ago
        Because everybody wants to be a monopoly but nobody wants to be monopolized.
        tjs8rj 5y ago
        Not sure what you mean. It’s definitely glamorized, just like working a high paying finance job is (but I don’t think many would call Wall Street ethical or moral). Lots of people want to be VC backed because it’s great for you, but it’s more complicated whether it’s great for anyone else
      - chrischattin 5y ago
        They stopped refunding payment processing fees on refunds, for one.
        frakkingcylons 5y ago
        Long after other comparable gateways had already stopped refunding those too.
giarc 5y ago
Gumroad deposits to Paypal, Stripe deposits to bank account. Seems like a big difference, no?
- Kye 5y ago
  Gumroad deposits to bank accounts, but it might be regional. I have a section for ACH in my setup page. You can optionally also add a PayPal account to accept PayPal.
  - __float 5y ago
    According to https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-page https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-pa..., it depends on Stripe's availability for ACH payouts.
  - giarc 5y ago
    I was just referring to the marketing copy by SHL in the tweet.
- aazaa 5y ago
  Gumroad also deposits to bank account.
  - giarc 5y ago
    I was simply referring to the marketing copy in the linked Tweet.
- swyx 5y ago
  more than that. Gumroad also acts as a merchant of record (much much cleaner for international and EU/US taxes), provides social proof (reviews) and a discovery marketplace, together with a no code frontend with fulfilment (aka it hosts your files) Stripe has a ways to go but certainly can clone these if they wish)
  - swyx 5y ago
treelovinhippie 5y ago
If the YC-adjacent scene stopped funding boring incremental startups maybe we'd dig our way out of the Great Stagnation. Gumroad is something that should be a 0% fee opensource developer component, not an entire company. The YC Facebook feed has been depressing lately: $6M funding for one of those links-on-a-page startups, $50M funding for a startup that wants to sell Pokemon cards on a livestream. The VCs are fuelling stagnation by funding these boring inconsequential projects.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  Just look at the Show HN - YC batch companies, none of them are doing anything remotely groundbreaking or risky. A ton of them are solving minor workflow problems trying to skim shit off the top.
  - treelovinhippie 5y ago
    Alas the HN echo-chamber ensures these points are pushed out of the bubble. Why is YC funding this sort of shit? https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator-profiles https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator...
    - sebmellen 5y ago
      Unfortunate that you're being downvoted for raising cogent points. I do think companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Ginko Bioworks, etc. are doing pretty neat stuff. Even if these businesses don't seem groundbreaking, they clearly are, somehow. But the recent batches of YC startups seem disappointingly... competitive. As in the Thiel-ian sense of not doing much fundamentally different from other players in the market. I wonder if this could be attributed to Paul Graham stepping back from the front lines.
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stanislavb 5y ago
Gumroad is in for a bit of direct competition by a behemoth. I'm sure they won't have good sleep in the coming months.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  I don't think so. Gumroad has a product delivery platform, where stripe only handles payment. I recently evaluated stripe vs gumroad for a product, and went with gumroad because they make getting the digital product to your customer VERY easy, while stripe leaves it all up to you
dan-robertson 5y ago
Aren’t these quite different things with similar copy? Gumroad seems to me to offer a way to eg sell copies of your pdf. This stripe service seems to be a way to make a link saying “that will be $79.82 please” and collect payment (and maybe some other details). I.e. Gumroad provides some online store for a single digital product and stripe offer a way to collect money for anything but they don’t handle actually giving you the thing. Obviously there is some overlap but the pitch is different. Edit: maybe I’m actually wrong and these are really similar. The thing I described above is more like an invoice for which this maybe isn’t suited (pay an invoice once/periodically but these links may be hit many times). So I’m not really sure now
senbarryobama 5y ago
This is Insta story/reels all over again!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

grenoire 5y ago

Mollie has been providing this service under the Plink [1] brand name for quite a while, I was looking for something to get my clients onboard with Stripe without using Billing (main reason being Mollie having difficulty serving corporate US cards from time to time). Nice move, simple product, extremely useful! [1] https://useplink.com/en/ https://useplink.com/en/

the-dude 5y ago
There are other niche PSPs who have been doing exactly this for over a decade.
vincentkriek 5y ago
For context, in the Netherlands (where Mollie was founded) sending payment requests by text took off when one bank set up a service geared for consumers that provided this (Tikkie [1]). Mobile payments were common place before this, so customers were already used to this. Taking this to the next level, by having businesses use this is a great and logical step. [1] https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/internet-and-mobile/apps/Tikkie/index.html https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/internet-and-mobile/apps/...
- grenoire 5y ago
  Implemented a small app this, such a clean API. Love it and hope it goes pan-European. Although I think it may be the Dutch money culture that got it to blow up so bi, ha!
  - vincentkriek 5y ago
    I'm curious, what is the "Dutch money culture"? I haven't used paper money in ages, is that specifically Dutch or are you hinting at something else?
    - markus92 5y ago
      The "I send you a tikkie for this .25ct tomato paste can"-meme.

thinkafterbef 5y ago

TillyPay? https://tillypay.com/ https://tillypay.com/

throxwaway98123 5y ago

This is absolutely the worst news for Shopify. A very large portion of SMBs want to sell a handful of things without the overhead of maintaining and paying over the top for a e-commerce cms. This plus social media will be a huge win for a lot of businesses

zyang 5y ago
Shopify is fine. They have a nice eco-system of devs and integrated apps. Gumroad should be worried.
- throxwaway98123 5y ago
  Shopify is fine is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Shopify is the 2008 equivalent in the tech world. Hugely overvalued, no secret sauce (pretty web fronts that are powered by stripe) Shopifys moat is nonexistent.
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    Shopify's moat is its ecosystem of developers and apps, for many of the same reasons WordPress still powers 39.5% of all websites in 2021. Shop Pay also provides many of the same benefits of Stripe -- global one-click payment across all their stores and more. I run into Shopify sites while shopping all the time and am always pleasantly surprised that I don't have to fill out anything to check out, it already knows me. Then those orders magically show up in the Shop app on my phone for order status and delivery tracking. Here's a screenshot. I did not make an account with any of these completely independent websites. Yet I checked out on all of them without typing my address or payment info. And all my orders appear here with tracking. https://i.imgur.com/D4XfvnJ.png https://i.imgur.com/D4XfvnJ.png
    - throxwaway98123 5y ago
      Wordpress is a free product. Shopify is not. Shopify built a good ecom cms and they’ll be right for some companies, but they’ve also cornered themselves as that company that makes ecom software. Remember Shopify POS? Me either. Anyways, consumer trends change. The way people buy online will change. There’s a future where ecom websites are basically the back catalogue of the future.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

I love watching Stripe going upmarket with e-comm streamlining offerings (links, subscriptions), the foresight shows (payment commodification eventually, Value Add Is The Way).

jackerman 5y ago
Thank you for the kind words! We're always working to improve our products; feedback welcome!

ds 5y ago

I built something like this way back in 2008, since paypal let you set a IPN dynamically. Was basically a pastebin behind a paywall. I found it incredibly difficult to market, but I think I was doing it wrong because gumroad took off many years later https://www.redferret.net/tiny-checkout-very-cool-little-online-checkout-service/ https://www.redferret.net/tiny-checkout-very-cool-little-onl... https://web.archive.org/web/20090227044608/http://www.tinycheckout.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227044608/http://www.tinych...

londons_explore 5y ago

So how does this differ from PayPal pay buttons from the 2000's?

tmikaeld 5y ago

Same as https://www.plugnpaid.com https://www.plugnpaid.com ?

yannoninator 5y ago

This. is. going. to. be. HUGE! Lots of companies Stripe has replaced because of this. I can see new areas of businesses being launched because of how easy Stripe has made it to be paid online, all with no-code! No more third parties or complex developer integrations or a cut, only get paid with a link with Stripe, That's it! I welcome this!

throxwaway98123 5y ago
Yep yep yep. The things this will enable are endless. This is truly headless e-commerce.
Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
That's the promise. However, I recently set up an e-commerce website for my wife. I was actually a bit shocked to discover that whilst Stripe's offerings are like 95% of the way there, that missing 5% means you can't take advantage of said offering at all. 1. I setup Stripe Checkout for subscriptions and thought I was good to go. However, my wife wanted to take sign-ups in anticipation of a set launch date in the future i.e. don't invoice until a specific date. Nope, no can do, the "billing_cycle_anchor" property can't be set with a checkout session. You can add a trial period, but then Stripe's Checkout UI goes out of it's way to emphasise that you're giving the customer a free trial. Which is inaccurate and the incorrect messaging would likely run us afoul of consumer law in Australia. So I had to ditch Stripe Checkout entirely and move to Stripe Elements. Then I realised another painful edge case. You can't set "billing_cycle_anchor" more than a month away (with monthly billing). So I did end up having to set a free trial period, but at least I could hide this information so my UI wasn't misleading customers into thinking they were getting something free when they weren't. 2. You can't create a trial period for less than 48 hours. So there's an edge case I need to handle as we approach the launch date i.e. I need to use "billing_cycle_anchor" sometimes, and free trial periods other times. 3. You can't attach shipping costs to subscriptions, at least, not without manually editing invoices i.e. somewhat reinventing the subscription logic. 4. You can't attach more than one coupon to a subscription. So you end up either manually messing with invoices, or creating weird amalgamation coupons. The latter seems simple, but it's not because if you want to offer a launch discount (for the first invoice) and indefinite free shipping, this simply cannot be represented using Stripe's coupon functionality. 5. Subscriptions don't have shipping addresses, only customers do. So if a customer wants to have multiple subscriptions delivering to different addresses then Stripe's Customer Portal offering becomes fairly useless. So we need to have our own UI and storage for shipping addresses for each subscription. Basically I found that I needed to reinvent a bunch of stuff Stripe was already doing, in order to get that extra 5%. In which case I could almost as easily go with a different payment processor. I am very much looking forward to when Stripe has time to iron out the kinks. Because wowee it was easy to get Stripe Checkout up and running. I really thought it was smooth sailing... but then it wasn't.

alberth 5y ago

Conversational Commerce Question: for those who run e-commerce sites, how common do you see Conversation Commerce gaining use by buyers? E.g. significant portion of sales, small portion of sales, gaining adoption, declining adoption? Just curious since the demo on Stripe's site is exactly this use case where someone is provided the link to purchase via a chatbot.

jordhy 5y ago

So Gumroad is dead???

ergocoder 5y ago
Different targets. And there can be multiplayers. Gumroad is essentially a one-person company. Maybe they are impacted. I doubt they will be dead.

korijn 5y ago

Are they setting foot outside USA yet? Just wondering.

edwinwee 5y ago
Stripe has set foot in 44 countries—with many more countries on the roadmap. https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
iou 5y ago
Yes. https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global Available in 38 countries, previewing in 6

endisneigh 5y ago

This is pretty great, but I think some people are overestimating the significance of this - PayPal.me has existed for a while and it hasn't exactly killed off small payment providers.

pbreit 5y ago
paypal.me is a bit different. But the original PayPal "Buy Now" buttons (from 2000) are similar.
nickjj 5y ago
Yeah, for the last few years there's also been Zelle (at least in the US). This is IMO a killer service because all you need is the person's email address or phone number, there's no fees, it's really fast and it's a feature built into most major banks' dashboard so there's no sign up process. It's like the best possible thing you could ask for, but small payment providers in the US still exist. It's really handy for the use case of sending or accepting infrequent 1 to 1 payments (invoices, referral payouts, etc.). It supports recurring payments too.

pc 5y ago

(Stripe cofounder.) While there are lots of antecedents (this is, after all, just a checkout page with a URL), and even though this was substantially inspired by the growth of the no-code ecosystem[0], the thing that's interesting to me about the payment link "space" is that it's a use case that really took off in other markets first -- Nigeria, India, Philippines, etc. I suspect that staying abreast of important new patterns emerging outside US/Europe will become more important for many businesses in the years ahead... there are a lot of legacy assumptions being questioned. And feedback very welcome on our Payment Links product itself! [0] We were excited to have Ben Tossell, one of the original no-coders, as one of our beta users: https://twitter.com/bentossell/status/1397246339898093568 https://twitter.com/bentossell/status/1397246339898093568

cyral 5y ago
Not related to payment links... but I would love to see Stripe take on handling in app purchases. (basically a webhook and management layer over the terrible native APIs) Companies like RevenueCat are halfway there but have nowhere as nice of an API or dashboard as Stripe. I run a cross platform (web/ios/android) app and would love to do payments all under one platform (Stripe, that is). Apple and Google subscriptions have so many complexities and edge cases that companies like RevenueCat and Qonversion are enormously helpful, but they themselves have many bugs and issues that I've ran into.
- jeiting 5y ago
  Would love to hear how we can improve the API to make you not want Stripe to do it better. :) Obviously, Stripe is the gold standard and I think we have a hard time, but we're hoping to improve the developer experience even more this year.
  - cyral 5y ago
    My main issue is how the webhooks sometimes give incorrect info, which has led to many customer complains when their subscription gets messed up by some edge case that I would expect to be abstracted away by RevenueCat but isn't. For example, when I implemented the PRODUCT_CHANGE event I expected it would notify me of the new product, but that is not the case on Android which led to bugs with some customers. It turns out that only iOS sends the new_product_id, so it is impossible to know from this event what the new product should be to display it in the app. Since upgrades/downgrades are immediate on Android, it turns out that the solution was just to not handle that event on Android since the renewal event would override the product anyways. (but sometimes the events came out of order, which is what led to bugs when PRODUCT_CHANGE was after RENEWAL). There are a lot of cases where events in the dashboard are totally out of order and don't make sense, like showing a customer purchasing the lesser plan, then renewing for the upgraded plan, and then switching from the lesser to the upgraded plan 10 days later. How could that be possible? The switch should have been between the renewals, so it's very confusing to debug. I've been told that now the recommended approach is to ignore all the webhook data, and simply call the RevenueCat API to get the entitlement and subscription status - however I asked how to parse this into something meaningful and didn't get a good answer. I would like to know the users current entitlement, and the current subscription (which can be different than the entitlement). For example, if the user downgrades, their entitlement may still be the upgraded plan for a while, but the app should reflect that they are no longer subscribed, or that they are subscribed to a different plan. For the entitlement it is easy I think, just choose the highest entitlement level to use. For the subscription, maybe choosing the last renewed one would work? But there are so many complexities with downgrades, upgrades, crossgrades I don't know if that is true. The answer from support was basically that they didn't know, yet this is an absolute must for almost any app - there has to be a way to display what the user is currently paying (or not paying) for, linking out to the native UI is not an option as it's not user friendly and cannot be displayed cross platform (I want the website to also reflect what they are paying for). My big concern with this is also, why does the API supposedly return the correct data but the webhook doesn't? If I am calling the API 10ms after receiving the webhook, why can't the webhook just deliver correct data instead? Another current issue I discovered the other day was that grace periods are no longer working. The RevenueCat dashboard shows that they are getting a 7 day grace period (the expiration date in the dashboard is correct), yet in the webhooks I am getting the wrong expiration, one that is only a day away. Apparently this is due to a change by Google and a fix is (maybe?) on the way? But it caused a lot of issues that I didn't expect. Basically RevenueCat's promise is great, it has saved a ton of time but isn't quite there on fully abstracting all these native edge cases away, they crop up in the API occasionally, and the proposed fix to use the API instead of the webhook data is half baked when support has no idea how to actually parse it to get the current subscription that should be displayed to the user (in the case that they upgraded/downgraded and have more than one). I love the idea but I'm hesitant to recommend it to anyone because lately it's been causing a lot of headaches with customers having billing issues due to these inconsistencies.

mrtksn 5y ago

I quickly looked around but I couldn't get an idea on how Stripe handles the AML and similar complience stuff on this. There have been similar services for years now, one is especially popular among people who sell illegal items and services like IP TV for pirated premium sports channels since they can quickly create per order link that is disguised as selling hamster supplies or drilling heads. Shady transactions are never out of reach, I just stumbled upon on one here: https://twitter.com/charliehtweets/status/1396860850699395074 https://twitter.com/charliehtweets/status/139686085069939507... That's the interesting part of payment processors IMHO. Taking an order and making a transaction is a technical achievement maybe for a junior developer. It's a shame that the material on the business and legal side of these things is limited. Only engineers like sharing their ways :)

vmception 5y ago
The key thing to understand is the difference between the actual law, individual company's implementation of the actual law, individual company's policies that have nothing to do with the law and are just a shitty inconvenient business practice, and individual company's representatives that don't know the difference between any of that and just say any inconvenience or transaction limit is because of "anti money laundering compliance" Once you know, there is a lot you can do. But back to the actual law, AML is primarily the creation of a firewall between the physical bearer cash system and the electronic financial system conducted by banks and other financial intermediaries. Anything on the inside of the firewall has already passed AML, meaning that financial institutions and card processors can just assume AML has already occurred. Additionally, inside the firewall, some parts of the electronic financial system can be temporarily ostracized by sanctions. So the only check would be the OFAC list at that point to determine if you can accept payment or not. Compliance for a payment processor has nothing to do with detecting fraud and is pretty much just the OFAC list. So that's the answer. You wouldn't get an idea because there is nothing specific for them to do.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  > Compliance for a payment processor has nothing to do with detecting fraud and is pretty much just the OFAC list. I suspect that it's not that simple. I did some work for people in compliance, I have some idea on the work they do and it's not simply department of people simply checking against the OFAC list. I'm a bit familiar with banks and not with money processors though. I have seen the bank side of the relationship and they can be very nervous when working with payment processors that bring bad money(scammers, pyramid schemes, drug money, terrorism financing etc). I like the firewall concept but it feels incomplete. Stripe must be doing a lot of interesting work to not be the shady company that the banks don't like working with. If you have more concrete knowledge on the topic, what is the hard part of running money transaction service, I.E. money processor? Atomic book keeping is not the challenge keeping every kid on the block from starting a money processor business, I would guess.

newsbinator 5y ago

I can't test it: 1. I'm logged into Stripe's default dashboard 2. I go to https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links and press "Start Now" 3. I get redirected to a registration page 4. I press "Have an account? Sign in" 5. I get redirected to Stripe's default dashboard

edwinwee 5y ago
If you're logged into the Stripe Dashboard already, best to go to Products > Payment links. https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links (https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links was originally intended for new users, but we'll look into making that Start button better.)

renewiltord 5y ago

Is this Zapier-able? This is brilliant. Thank you!

edwinwee 5y ago
Yes: https://zapier.com/apps/stripe/integrations https://zapier.com/apps/stripe/integrations. Would suggest chatting with https://twitter.com/bentossell https://twitter.com/bentossell, who runs Makerpad (Zapier) and uses Payment Links!

NonEUCitizen 5y ago

Does this support limited inventory? e.g. I want to sell only one item for a certain SKU. If two people have the link, only the first person to purchase should succeed, while the 2nd person should get a "This item is no longer available" message instead of being charged.

jackerman 5y ago
Not yet, but this is something we're excited to build. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to tell you more.
- dvdhnt 5y ago
  This is a use case we would have, too - the ability to, for example, create a unique payment link that can be used exactly once or for a specific customer.

raviisoccupied 5y ago

I absolutely love this. Last year during the pandemic, we were using Eventbrite to process payments for events we were running. The cash we were getting was keeping our business going, until they decided to change their policy regarding pay outs (presumably due to cash flow issues of their own). In the end we found that using Typeform with a Stripe integration was the best way to reliably and quickly transact with our customers, so I'm extremely pleased Stripe has released a no code checkout experience of their own. Really excited to use this. Thank you Stripe.

jackerman 5y ago
Awesome! Can't wait to hear your thoughts/feedback on Payment Links; feel free to reach out at jackerman@stripe.com

msencenb 5y ago

Are we able to create these via the API (specifically through Connect)? I'd love to dig a bit deeper into the docs on integrating with this, but haven't managed to find them yet.

edwinwee 5y ago
Not today, but a Payment Links API is coming soon. (Will shoot an email if you'd like to test it.)
- msencenb 5y ago
  That would be awesome, thank you!

astlouis44 5y ago

Hey pc! Fellow startup founder here - we're creating a decentralized metaverse platform in WebGL, and I'm thinking this would be perfect as a easy-to-use payment system for creators and indie game devs to take payments in our ecosystem.

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parhamn 5y ago

I'm in Mexico right now and the gif/video animation was in Spanish. A+ for polish.

EastSmith 5y ago
My language, plus my currency. Pretty good job.

flarg 5y ago

What about an mpesa for the Western world? Paying money to bricks and mortar merchants by entering a short code?

LordAtlas 5y ago

I've seen this feature on Indian payment gateway companies for years now, so I guess I'm not terribly excited. Is this truly a new thing in the US?

farazbabar 5y ago

I believe I patented this in 2016: https://patents.justia.com/patent/10664883 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10664883

lostcolony 5y ago
And you're posting it here because...why? If you think there's a legal issue, this, obviously, isn't the forum. If you want to tell people "I had this idea first!" this also isn't the forum; you're either wrong, or are pointing to the wrong thing (patents aren't particular readable or understandable); show us the thing you made.
- farazbabar 5y ago
  Because I am excited that this idea got turned into a viable product. And what is wrong with sharing the excitement with my fellow nerds including the fact that I had this idea first? It is all about execution and kudos to stripe for taking this idea forward and turning into a viable product.
  - stevenhuang 5y ago
    Gumroad had this since 2011, 5 years before you filed your patent.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Then perhaps a comment along the lines of "This is really neat! I'm so glad to see someone else doing this; I originally patented something akin to it and then (never used it/did and here's the thing I built), and it's awesome to see continued development in this area". As it is, it's not clear what your intent is (hence my question). You aren't congratulating them. You aren't expressing excitement. To your credit, you also aren't claiming they're infringing, though it begins to approach it.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  > If you want to tell people "I had this idea first!" this also isn't the forum This is a good forum for it since it is for showing new products. If this violates a patent, I definitely want to know. If it doesn't, then there will be no problem, right?

agildehaus 5y ago

I wish there was a "donation links" feature similar to this, that supported recurring donations. There are a lot of companies like DonorBox that offer this but shave a decent percentage off the top of every donation which is hard on non-profits. PayPal has a donation link feature, but PayPal stinks in every possible other way.

jackerman 5y ago
We're excited to build donations support via Stripe Payment Links. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and I'll let you know as soon as it is live.
rorygibson 5y ago
Hi! Late to the party, but this is exactly the kind of problem that my startup, Trolley, solves. Warning: shameless plug. It's a no-code shopping cart that works with Stripe. We offer Donations that work as you describe. You could check it out - https://trolley.link https://trolley.link (you can email me direct at rg@trolley.link if you want to know anything more)
- agildehaus 5y ago
  You take 2% off the top of what Stripe already takes. No different from DonorBox. You mention on your website that there are discounts for non-profits, but I assume it's not 100%. The idea is that if Stripe offers it, they won't take anything off what they already take.

gorgoiler 5y ago

1.4% doesn’t sound too bad. I believe chip and pin point of sale is .65% to .85%. What are MasterCard / Visa’s rates for online sales?

mfkp 5y ago
Which market are you in? In the US I'm seeing "Starts at 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge"
- bjohnson225 5y ago
  Europe presumably where interchange fees are significantly lower than the US. I see: 1,4% + 0,25 € for European cards 2,9% + 0,25 € for non-European cards
- AnssiH 5y ago
  In EU Stripe is 1.4% + €0.25 for European cards, 2.9% + €0.25 for foreign cards, https://stripe.com/en-fi/pricing https://stripe.com/en-fi/pricing. There have been no recent changes to this.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  I’m seeing the UK rate on Stripe’s site and the comparison is with Barclaycard’s UK POS debit rates.
MinorTom 5y ago
+ 25ct is pretty bad for EU cards and stripe does not support any other payment methods (important for the European market). I recommend you consider other PSPs like Adyen (a stripe clone; ~1% + 10ct) or Mollie, though I have tried neither.

akomtu 5y ago

A similar idea, but for periodic donations. Sites offer "subscription links" that get a share of your fixed donation budget per month, meaning that if you designate 50 usd per month for donations, all those you're donating to will have to split 50 usd. In addition to that, stripe lets you kick out any subscription from the list. Stripe can also aggregate these micropayments to reduce visa/ACH/whatever fees.

RikNieu 5y ago

I just wish I could use regular Stripe. :'(

ecommerceguy 5y ago

We'll try this in lieu of PayPal invoices since those have become a pita.

samblr 5y ago

Hey Patrick, this is cool. Is payment link creation available as an API ? That would change everything

edwinwee 5y ago
Coming soon! Could you email us and we'll let you know once it's available? jackerman@stripe.com + edwin@stripe.com
paymentsstack 5y ago
https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout

dakial1 5y ago

We used this link model in Brazil (custom made) for a client that has a B2B2C platform where vendors (shop owners for a specific industry) use the client's platform as an endless aisle option. We had a challenge for the payment side because: - the payment needed to be to our client and not the vendor (to avoid double taxation); - integrating to the POS machines of more than 100K vendors was unfeasible; - The client wouldn't trust typing credit card info into the vendors computer/tablet/mobile. So the solution was to use a link that could be send (whatsapp, sms) or read (QR Code), that would take the client to a checkout and payment secure site to finish the transaction. With mobile wallets penetration increasing we can make more sophisticated solutions where the link would connect directly to the wallet. But for now we are working with link>payment.

redindian75 5y ago
How is the link generated? So basically it is a deep link into the clients checkout page? Each product gets its own link? do u have a demo somewhere?
- jackerman 5y ago
  Each product gets its own Payment Link. Jump into the Stripe Dashboard and give it a try today: https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links https://dashboard.stripe.com/payment-links Here's a quick video walkthrough as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH78KUu4Jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH78KUu4Jk
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - redindian75 5y ago
    Thanks... But I meant his custom solution he made for his client - not Stripe Paymentlinks :)
- dakial1 5y ago
  Unfortunately I can't share a demo or docs as this is NDA work we did for the client (and the commerce is still in alpha). But basically you're right. We would create a new checkout page (for the link) that would show the items of the cart (through the Commerce Platform API) and with the credit card fields shown (that would be later sent to the gateway). The link is for the checkout, so you'd have only one per cart/client and it has a timed session.

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soheil 5y ago

The significance of this is that now it is officially rubber-stamped by Stripe to just have a payment form on a website with shallow content (ie. no products or services). Send a link to get paid even if your product isn't launched yet, is what this is all about.

cblconfederate 5y ago
The danger of this is that the rubber-stamp of Stripe may turn to a stamp to avoid if this becomes infamous for shady transactions

t7s 5y ago

Any chance of expanding this to be similar to PayPal add to cart?

gmcquistin 5y ago

This looks great! Will it be possible to create a link on a backend application and have all the frontend handled by Stripe?

jackerman 5y ago
We're excited to build an API for Payment Links soon. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to add you to the early access beta when we launch!

Androider 5y ago

Hate to be a party pooper, but what about Sales Tax handling?

amzans 5y ago
I'm also interested in this, and someone recently shared this with me: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar Apparently Stripe's acquisition of TaxJar is meant to expand their offerings in sales tax compliance. From the article: As the latest addition to Stripe’s revenue platform, TaxJar will help businesses automate tasks such as: - Providing accurate sales tax rates at checkout, tied to the exact street address of the customer. - Automatically submitting tax returns to local jurisdictions and remitting the sales tax collected. - Producing local jurisdiction reports to show sales and sales tax collected—not only for each state, but for relevant counties, cities, and other special jurisdictions. - Evaluating a company’s products and intelligently suggesting the right product tax code.
- jackerman 5y ago
  We have a number of exciting tax-related launches with Stripe coming soon. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to give you early access.
  - c64b003acb3e0e2 5y ago
    "exciting" tax-related ... You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. ;)
- wilg 5y ago
  This sounds great! We switched to Paddle (https://paddle.com/ https://paddle.com/) so we didn't have to do tax compliance ourselves. Might switch back...
  - jackerman 5y ago
    Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to give you a sneak peak about some cool taxes-related features we're launching very soon.

saltedonion 5y ago

Can someone tldr what PayPal has been doing for the past half decade. While startups has been eating their lunch.

fukmbas 5y ago

I'll pretty much never trust this. Hard telling what's a scam

e_commerce 5y ago

Please reduce fees

foolfoolz 5y ago

I got scammed on a page like this recently through paypal. The page showed up on google shopping. It had the right picture and text. They mailed me one sock instead of the ~$100 item i wanted. luckily paypal refunded me but this was not a great experience

collaborative 5y ago

Stripe 1 - Paypal 0 I surely will be looking into this as Paypal fees are way more expensive

poxrud 5y ago
PayPal has had this for years with paypal.me

deleted 5y ago

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paymentsstack 5y ago

What is unique to this over what Square as already done:https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout https://squareup.com/us/en/online-checkout

mixcocam 5y ago

I'm going to set this up for one of my products tomorrow. There doesn't seem to be a way to request delivery information though. Hope I'm wrong.

edwinwee 5y ago
There is! When creating a link, just check "Collect customers' addresses."

slig 5y ago

Is there a way to automate emailing the user an ebook or any other digital good?

jackerman 5y ago
Yes! We've built a Zapier integration that'll help you do just that. Drop me a note at jackerman@stripe.com and happy to share further details with you.

nfoz 5y ago

Awesome feature. The first thing that comes to mind for me is fraud. Most obviously, what guarantees are in place that when I go to one of these links, that the seller company is who they say they are? I assume Stripe audits their customers and, for example, reviews the seller logo that's displayed to make sure it isn't misleading. But also, does Stripe give the seller any analytics about who (or how often) people are going to their sales link, even if they don't make a purchase? thanks :)

edwinwee 5y ago
When a seller creates a Stripe account to use Payment Links, they go through the same review processes (and face the same stringent regulations from card networks and banks) as any seller who creates a Stripe account to integrate our Payments API directly with their website. They will be rejected by Stripe if they violate our terms of service (i.e., if they're fraudulent). Sellers will be able to see if the buying process is started when a payment link is clicked: either through the Stripe Dashboard or through the API by listening for `payment_intent.created`.
- nfoz 5y ago
  Cool, thanks for the clarification! My only suggestion would be to maybe put the name of the seller in the URL, that way you can see something about who you'd be paying before clicking the link. I'm not sure that helps any particular threat model but it would make me feel better about even navigating to the stripe link somehow.
- nfoz 5y ago
  Also, I recommend adding a "Report" button to the page, so that would-be buyers can report if they arrived at a checkout page through fraud/misrepresentation.

purple_ferret 5y ago

meh, maybe this is big outside the us, but people just ask to be paid on Venmo/Cashapp around here. I don't see people wanting to share their numbers so they can get a clickable link.

powerlogic31 5y ago
I'm from the Philippines and we mostly use GCASH which is like Venmo for sending money. The biggest problem is the limit if you have a legitimate business. I think that's where stripe link is useful. "Sending money" is different from "Buying something" from a government standpoint.

lenitabinol 5y ago

Glad I am long $PSTH

symlinkk 5y ago

2.9% + $.30 is insane. I can’t believe such a simple product is apparently worth so much.

CallMeMarc 5y ago
I guess this one’s going on Visa/Mastercard/etc as they are the ones charging the most of these fees[0]. [0] https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card-processing-fees-costs-america https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...
poxrud 5y ago
Even more expensive if you're in Canada and want to accept USD.

shml_onathan 5y ago

The page's hero animation is so good though

lvl100 5y ago

I wanted to use Stripe last year but ended up opting for Square. One thing I really would like (and a feature that would make me switch) is a more generalized way to set pricing structure and other options.

justinmcp 5y ago

Ok, so time to abandon https://www.honorarium.cc/ https://www.honorarium.cc/ ? At least it happened before all the polishing began...

o_____________o 5y ago

How do you handle a merchant in, say, Mexico and a customer in the US?

galaxyLogic 5y ago

I'm still trying to figure out a simple way to sell a DIGITAL product. How to prevent anybody who buys a copy to make a thousand copies from it and share them on the internet. Is there such a way?

likeabbas 5y ago
Isn’t that what NFTs are for? https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-boom-collectors-shell-out-crypto/ https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-boom-collectors-shell-out-c...
- Vadoff 5y ago
  Nope, NFTs are for claiming that you own the “original” digital work. It doesn’t prevent people from copying and sharing it.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    So NFTs are basically something like copyright? Only the person having the copyright can sell it. So why do we need NFTs if we can own a copyright to some digital creation, and can sell that copyright as well?
cheeze 5y ago
Depends on the digital product, but usually you're looking at something like a license key and DRM. If someone is determined enough, they _will_ distribute thousands of copies of it though.
folli 5y ago
I recently came across Fastspring, they let you generate a license key upon purchase. I'm not using it myself, but it might be helpful https://fastspring.com/docs/fulfillments/ https://fastspring.com/docs/fulfillments/
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Seems interesting, thanks

tndl 5y ago

SumUp's had something like this for a while now, US included: https://sumup.com/remote-payments-usa/ https://sumup.com/remote-payments-usa/

swyx 5y ago

In case it helps anyone, I've just put up a 3 minute demo of Stripe Payment Links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLNFJNoL9e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLNFJNoL9e8 (as a user of Stripe Checkout it was the natural next step)

folli 5y ago

Off topic: can anyone recommend a Stripe alternative that's a bit less risk averse than stripe is? I'm trying to test the water with a service in the crypto space (it's not about selling/buying cryptocurrency, but about automating some stuff regarding blockchain interaction). I got declined by Stripe based on their terms of service (i.e. don't mention the word blockchain). I'm currently looking into payrexx (however seems way less polished than Stripe), and I've heard about Ayden and Mollie (don't know if they are equally conservative). Any recommendations?

sidcool 5y ago
Sorry in advance, I don't want to sound snobby, but did you mean 'risk averse'?
- folli 5y ago
  Yes, thank you Swype keyboard
runeks 5y ago
I don’t know about their terms of service, but I’ve heard good things about Adyen. They also support more payment methods than Stripe: https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods.
- qw 5y ago
  Adyen has payment links too
- schmidmobile 5y ago
  The Paylink solution from Payrexx is very sophisticated and offers more options than almost any other solution. See: https://www.payrexx.com/en/products/paylink/ https://www.payrexx.com/en/products/paylink/

aj_nikhil 5y ago

Razorpay has had this for a while . Stripe seems to be catching up.

cre832982 5y ago

Do you have any plans to open a service in S.Korea?

cre832982 5y ago

Do you have any plans to open a service in Korea? I'm looking forward to it.

uncleBobby 5y ago

How PayNowLink can create Stripe links without using an API ?

boraoztunc 5y ago

It would be great to have a dedicated page to display all the products, that have been created by Stripe Payment Links. So when I shared the link, customer also can have an option to navigate to that page and view other products, available right there to purchase. https://buy.stripe.com/dR6cOd9RJ8KS8nufYZ https://buy.stripe.com/dR6cOd9RJ8KS8nufYZ For this demo link for example, I wanted to see other stickers in "Stripe Sticker Shop". May be this more of a e-commerce feature, rather than a payment/checkout solution, but after all it is all about selling and buying.

cblconfederate 5y ago

How do people handle taxes/accounting/receipts and invoicing for this kind of stuff. At least in the EU it would be a nightmare if you rely on a bunch of such links to sell.

dbbk 5y ago
Just use Paddle

CyanDeparture 5y ago

This is off topic, but all of Stripes landing pages are a masterpiece of web design. Just so pleasent to browse.

ElectricMind 5y ago

Someone told me there will be free cupcakes along with this announcements :(

bbtd 5y ago

Hey folks! This is great! Do you have plans to launch in more latin american countries other than BR and MX?