7 ms·

What's the OP/your alternative? Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze yo

What's the OP/your alternative? Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales. Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s Actually, the problem is super structural: - Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business. We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't. - Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you. This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.

viggity 4y ago
didn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"
- viggity 4y ago
  apparently it wasn't stripe, it was WePay. FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
rshm 4y ago
> What's the OP/your alternative? Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.
- carom 4y ago
  Implement it all yourself and have the UI be awful is not a good solution. Stripe takes about 1 day to set up. Getting a meeting with an interested bank or credit union could easily take 1 month.
  - mobiclick 4y ago
    I'd take a shitty ui over a shiny ui backed by an unpredictable algorithm any day. That people would prioritize ui and initial setup costs over payment processing reliability is insane to me.
sfont 4y ago
I am an extremely small account and have a merchant account with Authorize.net. Most of my customers pay by check so I even have some months where I have zero card transactions. There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%… I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.
peanuty1 4y ago
> What's the OP/your alternative? Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

viggity 4y ago

didn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"

viggity 4y ago
apparently it wasn't stripe, it was WePay. FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com

rshm 4y ago

> What's the OP/your alternative? Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.

carom 4y ago
Implement it all yourself and have the UI be awful is not a good solution. Stripe takes about 1 day to set up. Getting a meeting with an interested bank or credit union could easily take 1 month.
- mobiclick 4y ago
  I'd take a shitty ui over a shiny ui backed by an unpredictable algorithm any day. That people would prioritize ui and initial setup costs over payment processing reliability is insane to me.

sfont 4y ago

I am an extremely small account and have a merchant account with Authorize.net. Most of my customers pay by check so I even have some months where I have zero card transactions. There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%… I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.

peanuty1 4y ago

> What's the OP/your alternative? Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api