18 ms·

Stripe is PayPal circa 2010

496 points by qualudeheart 4y ago

emadda 4y ago
If you want to analyse your payment failures with SQL you could use https://table.dog https://table.dog to download them into a SQLite database.
blantonl 4y ago
This is a maddening writeup to read, only because for developers and business owners the single most important part of our businesses, receiving money from paying customers, is also the most excruciating, arbitrary, and frustrating part of our businesses as well. Stripe was "supposed" to fix this. But as we all know, banking and payments is hard. I run a nice successful business where premium subscriptions are my primary revenue model, and I as well relied on Paypal for years as my payment card processor. Some notes about my experiences over the past 20 years 1) The Paypal hell-ban thing is real. I had a handful of customers open support tickets monthly with me and indicate no matter what they did they could not successfully send us a credit card payment using Paypal as our payment processor. Paypal just says "Nope" and that's it. For all of the customer's payment methods. 2) It's true, there is a subset of people in this world that absolute loath Paypal and will open support tickets telling you so, which means there's a lot more of those people out there that just bail. 3) A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my primary credit card processor since I wanted to resolve #2 and just provide a simple hosted credit card form. Surprisingly, the transition was pretty easy, the APIs and webhooks were documented nicely, there were libraries available, and it didn't take me long at all to get up and running quickly. The onboarding process was pretty onerous (you'd think I was taking out a 10 million dollar mortage on a vacation home) but once we got going everything has been super smooth. Highly recommend Braintree. 4) I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of just a simple "enter your credit card information" form. I've never run into freezes, or some of the other nightmares seen out there, but definitely payments even in this day and time can be maddeningly frustrating. And there's always chargebacks and some of my favorite customer "excuses" for demands for refunds etc. Like: 1) "My 5 year old son signed up for an account on your service and purchased a premium subscription, please provide a refund immediately" - transaction happened at 2am local to the customer and you've got to provide your credit card CVV. 2) Customer purchases a 2 year premium subscription and then opens a support ticket and demands a refund because "I'm not quite sure what this is" - meanwhile they could have purchased a 6 month subscription to try it out just fine. A surprising number of people will just bulldoze through and buy the most expensive option and then have buyers remorse. 3) "The browser autofilled everything and submitted the payment without my involvement whatsoever" - and then demand a refund. Never mind customer has to literally click the "Pay Now" button. 4) And of course the fraudulent chargebacks. They'll open support tickets and correspond with you and demand refunds and then charge it back as an unauthorized fraudulent charge. Maddening. 5) Various other crazy excuses for demanding refunds or charging back something instead of just outright saying "this isn't what I expected for xxx reason" - they'll throw spouses, kids, criminals, everything under the bus instead of themselves. It's wild.
- faitswulff 4y ago
  > A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my primary credit card processor IIRC Braintree is owned by PayPal, so I'm curious when to choose PayPal vs Braintree?
  - chalst 4y ago
    Paypal is more expensive.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Only for payments above a certain level. Many (most?) of my income comes from payments of US$1, and Braintree's fee structure for that (2.59% plus !!! $0.49 !!! per transaction) is untenable.
- chalst 4y ago
  > I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of just a simple "enter your credit card information" form. European here, but perhaps my experience is relevant: for nearly all the online credit-card processors, this step will require push-TAN and will fail for me. A fair proportion of websites are buggy and will not gracefully recover the session after the processor reports failure. Paypal, in contrast, has always been unproblematic. I'm patient and generally try the card before Paypal, but impatient customers in the same boat may behave differently.
- Daneel_ 4y ago
  I'm in that 25%. The fewer people I have to give my card details to, the better. It also saves me remembering/typing in the details every time since I just need to use my password manager to log into paypal and then I'm good.
- jwr 4y ago
  Braintree customer here (subscriptions). I'm surprised you found their APIs well documented, I have a terrible time every time I have to revisit the integration, which I have to do every (roughly) year or so. The whole 3DS2 migration in particular was very poorly handled, with documentation that had nothing to do with my use case. One more thing which I'm not sure you ran into: Braintree will eventually, at an arbitrary moment that you cannot predict or plan for, block all of your incoming funds and begin an audit. That audit can take anywhere from around a week to multiple weeks, during which time things will appear normal to your customers, but no funds will be disbursed to you. They will request various documents from you, some of which will feel somewhat invasive. From what I understand, this is routine procedure, usually tied to your monthly billing amounts, but could be triggered by other factors as well (unknown). So, it's better to make sure the business can handle a several week long suspension in disbursements.
nailer 4y ago
> if Stripe only compared the IP address GeoIP to Zip codes they could block 90% of them Personally I found geoblocking the Philippines massively reduces card fraud. I’m content to lose any legitimate traffic from the country in return.
- super256 4y ago
  You could force 3ds authentication for every charge. Works in Europe, as SDA is mandatory. Also supported with like >98% of customers from NA. Just very few banks do not support 3ds.
numair 4y ago
> Paypal's inclusion of fraud prevention makes it about 50% cheaper than Stripe with Radar. The money quote. (No pun intended!) I doubt this article will stay on the front page for very long, because HN seems to have a difficult time with content that is critical of one of Y Combinator's biggest portfolio positions.
- smca_ 4y ago
  This isn't quite accurate. Stripe Radar (our fraud prevention tool) is included free of charge for all accounts with standard pricing: https://stripe.com/radar/pricing https://stripe.com/radar/pricing.
- blfr 4y ago
  Don't know about the rest of HN, I have a hard time with content praising PayPal, considering things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
  - numair 4y ago
    I think this article is equally critical of both companies. Which is quite remarkable given the narrative that was popular a few years ago. We've gone from an obvious winner to a dead heat. Goes to show: if you've got perfect competition, just wait a while...
  - omnimus 4y ago
    Paypal is also completely unusable for companies that are based in country with different currency than they do bussiness in. If for example you are swiss (CHF) and do online bussiness in USD or EUR. Once you want to transfer the money to your company bank account it can be account only in CHF and Paypal will insist on doing the conversion with their very “friendly” exchange rate. Basically taking another ~5% making them much more expensive than the rest.
    - kareemm 4y ago
      I get around this by cashing out the original currency to Wise and then doing the conversion at much friendlier rates using them.
oli5679 4y ago
Growth of digital wallets could make payment products more homogeneous. If Apple/Google control the UX and fraud verification, people should go with the cheapest option. I'd love to buy a cheaper Stripe alternative, and if it has a poor UX I'd only use it for Google/Apple wallet payment, which could be more than 75% in Europe by the end of the decade.
- mlinhares 4y ago
  That’s not how digital wallets work, they’re just on the client side, you still need Stripe or something like it to talk to the credit card companies and perform the payment (and all the other backoffice steps required that people don’t know about, swiping the card is the simplest part of the whole process).
ksec 4y ago
>People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. This coming from Zed Shaw at least carries more weight than me ranting about this observation on HN. One of the thing listed in the article that had me really worry was chargeback. And it seems to be quite common in Stripe world. In low margin world $15 is quite a lot unless you have volume.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Corporations really want you to believe that grassroots personal boycotts are ineffective and a waste of time, but the truth is much more complicated. Enough people boycott PayPal to make a web developer choose another payment product. He writes about it on HN which amplifies the boycott’s message to tens of thousands of readers. Some of them will join the boycott. PayPal’s PR department is presumably unhappy about this reason now coming up in searches like “PayPal vs Stripe.” And it didn’t take any centralized organizing.
- smca_ 4y ago
  (Sam from Stripe here.) The customer's bank (not Stripe) levies a $15 fee to process the dispute. If you win the dispute, we credit you $15 because we feel it's the right thing to do.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    No.. because the merchant is paying for those fees. Not the customer / consumer. You might have different agreements, because you negotiated lower prices because supposedly you have better fraud detection etc.. But that's not the same as "because we feel it's the right thing to do". On the side of the merchant you do the same.. with "Stripe Chargeback Protection", but you charge for that. You took a part of the bank's/card's business (risk management), and that's fine, but please don't tell us stripe is doing things because you feel anything.
dubcanada 4y ago
Stripe is extremely bad at fraud. I have a company that continues to charge my credit card monthly, their website and email do not work anymore. I continue to charge back them every single month, and Stripe continues to charge my card. This has been going on for about 7 months now. If I ask them to help, they tell me to contact AMEX, I contact AMEX they tell me to contact Stripe. The website doesn't work, the email doesn't work, I charge it back every single month, yet Stripe doesn't care one bit. Attempting to contact Stripe results in emails asking if I need help resetting my password (yes I legit sent an email asking for them to investigate the "company" and they sent back a reply with details on how to reset my password), to telling me to contact my credit card provider. Honestly both companies are giant bags of turds, if you can you should look elsewhere, you can save money on almost every fee, there are alternatives to every single product they provide, and pretty much all of the alternatives are varying degrees of better or cheaper.
- codegeek 4y ago
  You can contact AMEX to block the vendor from any further charges. Can you not ?
  - dubcanada 4y ago
    I've done that 4 times, AMEX has a block (multiple blocks as per the reps). But the charges still go through (that's another story). The AMEX people just keep saying Stripe has a "iron clad contract" so even with that, they cannot do much. I am not saying it is a 100% Stripe. But why would a company like Stripe allow me to do (successfully) 7 chargebacks in a row. At what point would an account be shut down or a subscription terminated? If this was PayPal, the account would have been frozen ages ago.
    - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      Can you not report your card as stolen, get your bank to issue you a new one, and be done with it?
      - 4y ago
Ecco 4y ago
I rarely see Adyen mentioned in those HN threads. They might not be as big as PayPal or Stripe but in my experience they are really good.
- tnolet 4y ago
  I hope their API and SDK got better. It was a pain to implement and use some years ago. Stripe was light years ahead and we ended up switching. Also the capital demands from Adyen were much higher than Stripe.
  - Ecco 4y ago
    I would say they’re ok now. But that being said, I feel like we’re putting too much emphasis on the ease of integration anyway. Sure, it’s your first interaction with a payment gateway. But it’s also something you really only do once... I believe other criterias are a lot more important.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      Management: "Hey guys, we need to implement some sort of payment system". Developers: "Ok, we'll see what's out there." Developers: "This one isn't well documented, this one isn't either... Oh hey this one is." Developers: "We suggest Stripe." Management: "Ok" I think you vastly underestimate the importance of ease of use.
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        Well it is a hard problem, isn't it? First impressions do matter, sure Management might also have a problem later in case of non-payment/chargebacks etc But, in general, people need to look past the first impression
        3np 4y ago
        Accurate, appropriately detailed, and up-to-date documentation and references are about way, way more than "first impressions". I really don't see how it's a hard problem either? How often does a payment gateway API really need to change? Just spend the resources necessary to get it right. If you really need to, hire (another) FTE on docs.
jotm 4y ago
In Europe, PayPal is PayPal circa 2010. Everyone knows it and it's too convenient - make account, add card and bank, pay wherever. Seller accounts seem to get shafted on the regular but they still keep using it.
Kukumber 4y ago
It's not, Stripe is the world before PayPal, annoying, and no protection against chargebacks/frauds, worse, you have to pay whenever it happen
dom96 4y ago
So what's a better alternative to PayPal and Stripe? Plaid? Square? Do these even offer the same services?
- analog31 4y ago
  I always keep an eye out, and haven't yet found an alternative to PP. My situation is that I sell a hardware gadget, and run my business from a passive web page. PP lets me create forms that link to their website, so they actually handle the transaction themselves. Most of the other services seem to start with: "Here's a sample of the code that you need to have running on your server." This liberates me from running a web server, having my own URL, or doing any kind of coding. I love coding, and do it all the time by day, but it would add a layer of complexity to my business that I don't need. PP has worked fine for me, but they always say that you should have a backup.
  - coob 4y ago
    Stripe only requires you to drop some JavaScript on your page…
- lucb1e 4y ago
  Liberapay was the smoothest payment experience I ever had, but I don't know if you have to be a non-profit to be listed there or something. Other than that, I always appreciate when one can simply fall back to a bank transfer, then I can choose to just give them 100% of the money without risk to either party (no magic fraud detection, no cut going to paypal) at the cost of waiting a few days for the payment to be confirmed. So basically, just post your IBAN on your website please and offer to tick that as a payment option. No third party needed besides the bank account that you already need for running a business.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using bank transfers and being told that a payment has completed (even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant). So while this can work for a donation model, where the individual payments are not connected with access to services or goood, it really doesn't work where you (the provider of said services or goods) need to know that the payment has completed.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
I switched a site from WorldPay (hey remember those guys) to Stripe not long ago. Way lower charges. Way more finicky to integrate and yes the documentation is API reference not 'tutorial'. 100% agree about the weird error cases (to the extent I think I've still not handled them all) and the asynchronous stuff (which I kind of understand but also hate). Fortunately it's a business model where chargebacks are extremely unlikely so that's not affected us.
- culiao 4y ago
  Overall, are you happy with the switch?
dnet 4y ago
> After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped seizing people's money illegally. Flipper Zero project might disagree: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/flipper_zero/status/156719464... https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
- groffee 4y ago
  Also https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-paypal-policy-lets-company-pull-2500-from-users-accounts-if-they-promote-misinformation https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-paypal-policy-lets-compan...
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Already rescinded, with a bullshit line about how it was a mistake in the press release.
    - hobobaggins 4y ago
      Clearly not a mistake.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  And it seems like they're trying to experiment with new legal ways to seize funds, like a $2500 fine for offensive speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Already rescinded. Please keep up.
    - kweks 4y ago
      The 2500$ fee isn't rescinded - it was only pulled for that specific case.
NorwegianDude 4y ago
I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks. Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard pricing, it's not 4 %... My experience over 10+ years using PayPal and 5+ years using Stripe is that Stripe has much better docs. Just had something stop working because PayPal changes their webhooks, and even their docs are wrong. Just a few hours ago a customer opened a PayPal claim, and now PayPal took the money hostage. The customer closed the claim, but the one case number the customer has resulted in 10 case numbers for me, and they are still open. When it comes to "friendly fraud" (customer buys something, and claims it was not them after receiving it), it would be hard to do a worse job than PayPal. If a customer opens e.g. 15 claims for unauthorized use, basically stating that someone else used their card, PayPal usually always agree with the customer on like 12 of them, while 3 of them PayPal think was legit. Sure PayPal, someone stole their PayPal account, purchased digital goods on my service on an account belonging to the PayPal owner that the PayPal owner clearly is using according to me and PayPal themself. Chargebacks usually costs money, but PayPal claims is basically just a click to take money from the seller, with no risk. So just that possibility makes PayPal much worse than Stripe. Stripe isn't perfect, but support is better and at least it's much more resistant to friendly fraud.
- prirun 4y ago
  > I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks. What the article says is that PayPal allows payers to request a refund, which is not a chargeback and is free to the vendor. Stripe does not have a dispute or refund process other than chargebacks and they charge vendors $15 for each according to the article.
- Dawnyhff2 4y ago
- hobobaggins 4y ago
  > Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard pricing, it's not 4 %... Radar is not free. https://stripe.com/radar/pricing https://stripe.com/radar/pricing
amelius 4y ago
Except they have better CSS.
nicgrev103 4y ago
I mainly use stripe because they have significantly lower transaction fees. 1.4% +20p vs 2.9% +30p UK
- dangrossman 4y ago
  I use a merchant account because it has significantly lower transaction fees, as low as 0.05% vs 2.9% for debit and check cards for example.
rippercushions 4y ago
I'm sure the business side has its problems, but as a consumer, I far prefer Stripe over PayPal. I've never had a payments problem with Stripe, while PayPal is consistently painful. I have a credit card issued by a bank in country X, but my home address both in reality and in bank X's records is in country Y. This seems to consistently trigger that fabled PayPal fraud protection the article mentions, making it impossible to enter my information correctly. After lots of poking about in the dark, I eventually figured out that the only way to make PayPal payments through this card is to set my country as "X" and enter a completely fictitious address in X with a separate delivery address in Y, after which the transaction sails through happily.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  I tried to pay with Stripe only once and it didn't let me. Can't live in Germany and provide a Dutch bank account. Should not make any difference within the Single Euro Payment Area. Sorry, DeepL, then I will have to continue to use the free version, I'm not missing any features anyway, I just wanted to pay for my use... (I also let support know but they didn't care of course.) PayPal required for a few years that I use a VPN for being allowed to log in. All the support could do for me was offer to close my Dutch account so that I could open a German account to use here. I hear that others have no problems using PayPal while on holiday abroad, so not sure what's up with that. Sometimes it also throws javascript errors and gets stuck on some loading icon. Plus all the horror stories about paypal. The things that always worked effortlessly for me were iDeal (collaboration of Dutch banks for online payments), regular bank transfers (always free in the SEPA zone, but takes 0-4 days depending on bank holidays and servers that take a weekend off), and direct debit (provide your name, address, and IBAN, such as at Liberapay, and everything will be arranged automatically). Basically, the European stuff simply works, not sure why.
- dubcanada 4y ago
  I've had problems with both, but at this very moment more problems with Stripe then PayPal. At least with PayPal if I sign up for a $10 a month plan I can go into PayPal via the very very difficult to find recurring transaction area and cancel said transaction. I cannot do that on Stripe. I strongly feel that I should be able to cancel ANY monthly transaction without having to go through the hoops and juggling act that is attempting to get the merchant to cancel said transaction. If I want to cancel a subscription why do I have to convince someone else to do it. Just let me cancel my stupid monthly subscription since everyone wants to do them.
nightpool 4y ago
This article is extremely confusing and filled with do many errors it's hard to even list them all. However, the bit I wanted to focus on was the author's claim that PayPal got "sued" and "stopped taking money from people". Getting sued is part of the ordinary course of business for a company like PayPal, and ~85% of lawsuits like that go nowhere, and result in no internal changes. The specific lawsuit the author seems to have been talking about was dismissed entirely by a judge in July, because the contact you sign with Facebook when you use their account explicitly forbids you from suing them instead of going through private arbitration proceedings: https://www.pokertube.com/article/chris-moneymaker-s-class-action-lawsuit-against-paypal-falls-at-first-hurdle https://www.pokertube.com/article/chris-moneymaker-s-class-a... (Chris Moneymaker's Class Action Lawsuit Against PayPal Falls At First Hurdle). And again, this is the kind of thing that happens to PayPal all the time. The fact that some random lawsuit that never even required a substantial reply from PayPal got picked up by Zed as evidence of their bad behavior "finally catching up to them" really erodes my confidence in the way he represents any of the other details in this article. What else is he misrepresenting or exaggerating?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Dawnyhff2 4y ago
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  "the contact you sign with Facebook"? I am so confused. Do you mean the contract you sign with PayPal?
  - nightpool 4y ago
    Whoops, yes. I think I was talking to someone about Facebook in a different window when drafting this comment orz. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this reply in time to edit my comment. Thanks for pointing it out anyway :)
    - 4y ago
testfrequency 4y ago
Not even remotely comparable. - PayPal is trying to be a wallet for online payments - Stripe is payment infrastructure for the world
Dawnyhff2 4y ago
ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
>After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped seizing people's money illegally. I still have no idea how this was not full on totally illegal, but I'm sure someone can explain to me how payment companies get away with keeping money that is clearly not theirs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950
BrainVirus 4y ago
The article is full of misrepresentations, some of which were already pointed out. One I have to point out myself: ">People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. So much so that they will refuse to give my small business money if it goes through Paypal on the off chance that those two guys might get some of it." This looks like pure spin. I don't know of anyone who refuses to use PayPal because of this reason. (Thiel and Musk are not running the company anymore.) I know a lot of people who refuse to use PayPal because it has some kind of directive to ban people for wrongthink. There are countless instances documented on ReclaimTheNet.org [1], and those are just the ones involving people of notoriety. [1] - https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal There is literally a campaign of people closing PayPal accounts in protest of company's behavior right now. (That $2,500 fine proposal was the last straw.) Guess what? Many people see "errors" when they try to close an account. Dark patterns everywhere. In short, if you choose to use PayPal as a sole payment method for your business, know that you are alienating a lot of potential customers.
- dmix 4y ago
  The Thiel and Musk thing is bizarre, I've never heard of anyone being worried about that. eBay bought Paypal in the 'Paypal Mafia' two decades ago in 2002 which is when most of them cashed out their stock. I highly, highly doubt their founder stock is still in any way connected to the various corporate iterations of Paypal that were sold and resold. Even 10 years ago this would be a silly thing to be concerned about. Paypal has enough real problems anyway.
- hlandau 4y ago
  Speaking personally, I refuse to use PayPal as a payment method because its payment form demands a phone number. Websites that only accept PayPal lose my business.
jgalt212 4y ago
> because Stripe clearly didn't care about fraud prevention But, they do like to write think pieces on it. https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/
JonoBB 4y ago
The one part of this article that I totally agree with is how terrible the API integration has become. In the early days, Stripe sold itself on a few things, one of which was the simplicity of integration. Since the whole PaymentIntents and SetupIntents introduction (along with the documentation fiasco that happened at the same time), integrating with Stripe is something like PayPal from 10 years ago. Its shit. PaymentIntents workflow (including the necessity to listen for webhooks) deserves a special place in hell. Its like they decided to copy Paypal IPN. I have used, recommended and intgrated Stripe to multiple businesses over the years (generating hundreds of US$ millions). For the past 2 years or so, I have migrated most of them away from Stripe, and any new integrations are done through other payment processors.
- echelon 4y ago
  I feel this comment. I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with. I couldn't find a single place advising which webhooks to listen to - or what their payloads should be - for simple subscription behavior. It's actually inconsistent in places. They built and accrued all of this complex billing behavior for all of these incredible upmarket needs, and in the meantime they forgot about the simple cases. I almost used PayPal or Square. Perhaps I should have. Stripe seems to have moved on to upmarket.
  - koromak 4y ago
    I was lead to believe a stripe API integration would take maybe a month of my time, for a subscription based service. Genuinely 3 months of development, with more roadblocks than I could have ever imagined.
  - jwr 4y ago
    > I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with. Braintree user here, have I got news for you. I regularly have to waste weeks of developer time on payment processing. The documentation is terrible and fragmented, some things are not explained anywhere, support response times hover around two weeks (I'm not kidding), and the canned support responses rarely fit my use case, so there's always a back-and-forth. This would all be fine if I could just get it done once, but the thing rears its head regularly, what with the newer PSD2 regulations or something else. As an example, after having done all the 3DS2 integration work (well, it was closer to re-work, as extensive changes were required), Braintree now tells me that 3DS1 is being deprecated (fine) and some of my transactions are 3DS1. Well, which ones, and WHY? I have no idea. I asked support on Sep 27, that was 12 days ago, no answer. I looked at Stripe and had a really hard time understanding how I can fit my subscription SaaS into it. I think if you fit the simplest common use case and you're willing to outsource everything, Stripe could be simple to use. If you want to be independent in any way, or want to maintain the relation to the customer yourself, things quickly get difficult. But the real reason why I can't even consider Stripe is multiple currencies: I want to settle in three currencies (including USD), and Stripe will only settle in USD to a bank account based in the US. Good luck getting a US bank account if you are an EU small business. Also, pricing looks reasonable at a first glance, until you notice the currency conversion fees and the extra "billing" fee. In my specific case I would end up at about 5.4%.
pierrebai 4y ago
Just as a contrary standpoint, I personally like to see the Paypal logo and the fact that it is Paypal processing my payment and not some I-roll-ed-my-own just-wait-for-me-get-hacked random system. I also learned to loathe stripe (and square) due to those PoS system that have ridiculously high tipping options even for transactions that really ought not to be tipping situation. No, I do not want to give 20% tips when buying bread over the counter at the bakery, thank you very much. (This may not be stripe fault, but the store owner. I resent both just to cover all bases.)
- spinlock 4y ago
  I used to tip the highest option at the “woke” coffee shop that I went to on the daily. Then, I asked the barista if she got the tips. She said the employees never saw any of those add on tips and I should give her cash if I wanted to tip _her_.
  - danenania 4y ago
    In many cases, depending where you live, withholding tips like that would be illegal.
    - spinlock 4y ago
      It is. Illegal stuff happens all the time.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Wage theft is startlingly common, outweighing all other kinds of theft in the US. https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Not disputing your story, but wouldn't the bad be on the business owner, not on the payment processor?
nottorp 4y ago
Hmm. All I understand is, should I ever try to sell something online, I should stay away from US based payment systems.
augasur 4y ago
Has anyone tried Paddle[1] both by integration and customer support? I have been looking at it for my future projects for quite some time. Fees seems to be a bit higher, but it also has both CC and PayPal integrations and can take care of the taxes. [1] https://www.paddle.com https://www.paddle.com
- fiznool 4y ago
  Not tried, but also researched thoroughly. The main difference as a ‘Merchant of Record’ is that they are effectively resellers of your product, and pay you a (majority) cut on all sales. As you mention, one of the big attractions for me is the fact they take care of local taxation laws - as a UK based seller I would be on the hook for calculating and charging VAT in all countries that I sell to, which is a massive headache / pain in the arse to get right. Much like the App Store, Paddle removes all of that, as a MoR they are your only ‘customer’ from an accountancy point of view. Of course, one of the big drawbacks here is conceding control of a critical part of your infrastructure to another organisation. Better hope they don’t hell ban you, or you’ll be totally screwed. But that seems to be an issue with whoever you choose.
blobbers 4y ago
The heresy of claiming the golden boys of YC, the Collison bros. could be running an evil company with a bad product! I jest I jest. ... I appreciate that the author is willing to write something counter to the narrative!
ta3411 4y ago
I am finding myself too locked in with Stripe Connect (we are building a marketplace) where Stripe is handling all KYC, onboarding, payment, and seller payout. Does anyone have any good recommendations on how to build redundancy into this? ie: receive payment via PayPal and build our own payout system
- tyre 4y ago
  (I work at Stripe.) With Connect, you can do onboarding flows yourself with the Custom plan. Note that information gathering and regulatory requirements for onboarding across dozens of countries is a huge amount of effort. We have whole teams working on this problem alone; not for the feint of heart. In the abstract we don’t care if you do onboarding or we do. Stripe doesn’t make money there. We offer a solution because it’s a difficult problem that we’re in a position to handle for users. With payouts you could do something similar. I believe there are platforms that pay everything out to one bank account and then pay out to customers themselves. I’m not an expert on these flows, but I believe it’s to cut down on foreign exchange fees—preventing multiple “hops”. We’re working on making this better.
  - ta3411 4y ago
    Thank you for the candid response. To be honest, another main reason I want to implement other payment provider is in case Stripe Connect bans one of our sellers. My goal is to have an approved Stripe Connect account that's controlled by my company (the marketpalce) and pull some sellers, who don't want to go through Stripe onboarding/payout, under it. Then i will build a manual payout flow on top of it. Which platforms are you referring to? I would love to dive deeper in those.
MarkPNeyer 4y ago
Did a quick ctrl-f for 'bitcoin' here in the comments. Finding nothing. Just have to add: Lightning Network payments are ~free, ~instant, and as bearer instruments the merchants aren't responsible for fraud.
- vinibrito 4y ago
  Well, honestly I would love for us to have what bitcoin wants to be. I just sigh because we're still far from the "ideal bitcoin".
smakosh 4y ago
We actually got our fees refunded due to some fraudulent transactions in our marketplace which initially Stripe refused to refund
viggity 4y ago
Sometimes the ease of use is just too good to pass on, but you can make it easier for yourself to switch providers later by using a tokenizer so that you own the CC numbers without needing to bend over backwards to be PCI compliant. Makes it a million times easier to switch providers down the road. I just switched to Basis Theory (basistheory.com) and its stupid simple.
Mindey 4y ago
What about no-chargebacks policy? A recouping transaction instead, like in blockchains.

496 points by qualudeheart 4y ago

If you want to analyse your payment failures with SQL you could use https://table.dog https://table.dog to download them into a SQLite database.

blantonl 4y ago

This is a maddening writeup to read, only because for developers and business owners the single most important part of our businesses, receiving money from paying customers, is also the most excruciating, arbitrary, and frustrating part of our businesses as well. Stripe was "supposed" to fix this. But as we all know, banking and payments is hard. I run a nice successful business where premium subscriptions are my primary revenue model, and I as well relied on Paypal for years as my payment card processor. Some notes about my experiences over the past 20 years 1) The Paypal hell-ban thing is real. I had a handful of customers open support tickets monthly with me and indicate no matter what they did they could not successfully send us a credit card payment using Paypal as our payment processor. Paypal just says "Nope" and that's it. For all of the customer's payment methods. 2) It's true, there is a subset of people in this world that absolute loath Paypal and will open support tickets telling you so, which means there's a lot more of those people out there that just bail. 3) A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my primary credit card processor since I wanted to resolve #2 and just provide a simple hosted credit card form. Surprisingly, the transition was pretty easy, the APIs and webhooks were documented nicely, there were libraries available, and it didn't take me long at all to get up and running quickly. The onboarding process was pretty onerous (you'd think I was taking out a 10 million dollar mortage on a vacation home) but once we got going everything has been super smooth. Highly recommend Braintree. 4) I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of just a simple "enter your credit card information" form. I've never run into freezes, or some of the other nightmares seen out there, but definitely payments even in this day and time can be maddeningly frustrating. And there's always chargebacks and some of my favorite customer "excuses" for demands for refunds etc. Like: 1) "My 5 year old son signed up for an account on your service and purchased a premium subscription, please provide a refund immediately" - transaction happened at 2am local to the customer and you've got to provide your credit card CVV. 2) Customer purchases a 2 year premium subscription and then opens a support ticket and demands a refund because "I'm not quite sure what this is" - meanwhile they could have purchased a 6 month subscription to try it out just fine. A surprising number of people will just bulldoze through and buy the most expensive option and then have buyers remorse. 3) "The browser autofilled everything and submitted the payment without my involvement whatsoever" - and then demand a refund. Never mind customer has to literally click the "Pay Now" button. 4) And of course the fraudulent chargebacks. They'll open support tickets and correspond with you and demand refunds and then charge it back as an unauthorized fraudulent charge. Maddening. 5) Various other crazy excuses for demanding refunds or charging back something instead of just outright saying "this isn't what I expected for xxx reason" - they'll throw spouses, kids, criminals, everything under the bus instead of themselves. It's wild.

faitswulff 4y ago
> A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my primary credit card processor IIRC Braintree is owned by PayPal, so I'm curious when to choose PayPal vs Braintree?
- chalst 4y ago
  Paypal is more expensive.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Only for payments above a certain level. Many (most?) of my income comes from payments of US$1, and Braintree's fee structure for that (2.59% plus !!! $0.49 !!! per transaction) is untenable.
chalst 4y ago
> I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of just a simple "enter your credit card information" form. European here, but perhaps my experience is relevant: for nearly all the online credit-card processors, this step will require push-TAN and will fail for me. A fair proportion of websites are buggy and will not gracefully recover the session after the processor reports failure. Paypal, in contrast, has always been unproblematic. I'm patient and generally try the card before Paypal, but impatient customers in the same boat may behave differently.
Daneel_ 4y ago
I'm in that 25%. The fewer people I have to give my card details to, the better. It also saves me remembering/typing in the details every time since I just need to use my password manager to log into paypal and then I'm good.
jwr 4y ago
Braintree customer here (subscriptions). I'm surprised you found their APIs well documented, I have a terrible time every time I have to revisit the integration, which I have to do every (roughly) year or so. The whole 3DS2 migration in particular was very poorly handled, with documentation that had nothing to do with my use case. One more thing which I'm not sure you ran into: Braintree will eventually, at an arbitrary moment that you cannot predict or plan for, block all of your incoming funds and begin an audit. That audit can take anywhere from around a week to multiple weeks, during which time things will appear normal to your customers, but no funds will be disbursed to you. They will request various documents from you, some of which will feel somewhat invasive. From what I understand, this is routine procedure, usually tied to your monthly billing amounts, but could be triggered by other factors as well (unknown). So, it's better to make sure the business can handle a several week long suspension in disbursements.

nailer 4y ago

> if Stripe only compared the IP address GeoIP to Zip codes they could block 90% of them Personally I found geoblocking the Philippines massively reduces card fraud. I’m content to lose any legitimate traffic from the country in return.

super256 4y ago
You could force 3ds authentication for every charge. Works in Europe, as SDA is mandatory. Also supported with like >98% of customers from NA. Just very few banks do not support 3ds.

numair 4y ago

> Paypal's inclusion of fraud prevention makes it about 50% cheaper than Stripe with Radar. The money quote. (No pun intended!) I doubt this article will stay on the front page for very long, because HN seems to have a difficult time with content that is critical of one of Y Combinator's biggest portfolio positions.

smca_ 4y ago
This isn't quite accurate. Stripe Radar (our fraud prevention tool) is included free of charge for all accounts with standard pricing: https://stripe.com/radar/pricing https://stripe.com/radar/pricing.
blfr 4y ago
Don't know about the rest of HN, I have a hard time with content praising PayPal, considering things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
- numair 4y ago
  I think this article is equally critical of both companies. Which is quite remarkable given the narrative that was popular a few years ago. We've gone from an obvious winner to a dead heat. Goes to show: if you've got perfect competition, just wait a while...
- omnimus 4y ago
  Paypal is also completely unusable for companies that are based in country with different currency than they do bussiness in. If for example you are swiss (CHF) and do online bussiness in USD or EUR. Once you want to transfer the money to your company bank account it can be account only in CHF and Paypal will insist on doing the conversion with their very “friendly” exchange rate. Basically taking another ~5% making them much more expensive than the rest.
  - kareemm 4y ago
    I get around this by cashing out the original currency to Wise and then doing the conversion at much friendlier rates using them.

oli5679 4y ago

Growth of digital wallets could make payment products more homogeneous. If Apple/Google control the UX and fraud verification, people should go with the cheapest option. I'd love to buy a cheaper Stripe alternative, and if it has a poor UX I'd only use it for Google/Apple wallet payment, which could be more than 75% in Europe by the end of the decade.

mlinhares 4y ago
That’s not how digital wallets work, they’re just on the client side, you still need Stripe or something like it to talk to the credit card companies and perform the payment (and all the other backoffice steps required that people don’t know about, swiping the card is the simplest part of the whole process).

ksec 4y ago

>People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. This coming from Zed Shaw at least carries more weight than me ranting about this observation on HN. One of the thing listed in the article that had me really worry was chargeback. And it seems to be quite common in Stripe world. In low margin world $15 is quite a lot unless you have volume.

pavlov 4y ago
Corporations really want you to believe that grassroots personal boycotts are ineffective and a waste of time, but the truth is much more complicated. Enough people boycott PayPal to make a web developer choose another payment product. He writes about it on HN which amplifies the boycott’s message to tens of thousands of readers. Some of them will join the boycott. PayPal’s PR department is presumably unhappy about this reason now coming up in searches like “PayPal vs Stripe.” And it didn’t take any centralized organizing.
smca_ 4y ago
(Sam from Stripe here.) The customer's bank (not Stripe) levies a $15 fee to process the dispute. If you win the dispute, we credit you $15 because we feel it's the right thing to do.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  No.. because the merchant is paying for those fees. Not the customer / consumer. You might have different agreements, because you negotiated lower prices because supposedly you have better fraud detection etc.. But that's not the same as "because we feel it's the right thing to do". On the side of the merchant you do the same.. with "Stripe Chargeback Protection", but you charge for that. You took a part of the bank's/card's business (risk management), and that's fine, but please don't tell us stripe is doing things because you feel anything.

dubcanada 4y ago

Stripe is extremely bad at fraud. I have a company that continues to charge my credit card monthly, their website and email do not work anymore. I continue to charge back them every single month, and Stripe continues to charge my card. This has been going on for about 7 months now. If I ask them to help, they tell me to contact AMEX, I contact AMEX they tell me to contact Stripe. The website doesn't work, the email doesn't work, I charge it back every single month, yet Stripe doesn't care one bit. Attempting to contact Stripe results in emails asking if I need help resetting my password (yes I legit sent an email asking for them to investigate the "company" and they sent back a reply with details on how to reset my password), to telling me to contact my credit card provider. Honestly both companies are giant bags of turds, if you can you should look elsewhere, you can save money on almost every fee, there are alternatives to every single product they provide, and pretty much all of the alternatives are varying degrees of better or cheaper.

codegeek 4y ago
You can contact AMEX to block the vendor from any further charges. Can you not ?
- dubcanada 4y ago
  I've done that 4 times, AMEX has a block (multiple blocks as per the reps). But the charges still go through (that's another story). The AMEX people just keep saying Stripe has a "iron clad contract" so even with that, they cannot do much. I am not saying it is a 100% Stripe. But why would a company like Stripe allow me to do (successfully) 7 chargebacks in a row. At what point would an account be shut down or a subscription terminated? If this was PayPal, the account would have been frozen ages ago.
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    Can you not report your card as stolen, get your bank to issue you a new one, and be done with it?
    - 4y ago

Ecco 4y ago

I rarely see Adyen mentioned in those HN threads. They might not be as big as PayPal or Stripe but in my experience they are really good.

tnolet 4y ago
I hope their API and SDK got better. It was a pain to implement and use some years ago. Stripe was light years ahead and we ended up switching. Also the capital demands from Adyen were much higher than Stripe.
- Ecco 4y ago
  I would say they’re ok now. But that being said, I feel like we’re putting too much emphasis on the ease of integration anyway. Sure, it’s your first interaction with a payment gateway. But it’s also something you really only do once... I believe other criterias are a lot more important.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    Management: "Hey guys, we need to implement some sort of payment system". Developers: "Ok, we'll see what's out there." Developers: "This one isn't well documented, this one isn't either... Oh hey this one is." Developers: "We suggest Stripe." Management: "Ok" I think you vastly underestimate the importance of ease of use.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Well it is a hard problem, isn't it? First impressions do matter, sure Management might also have a problem later in case of non-payment/chargebacks etc But, in general, people need to look past the first impression
      - 3np 4y ago
        Accurate, appropriately detailed, and up-to-date documentation and references are about way, way more than "first impressions". I really don't see how it's a hard problem either? How often does a payment gateway API really need to change? Just spend the resources necessary to get it right. If you really need to, hire (another) FTE on docs.

jotm 4y ago

In Europe, PayPal is PayPal circa 2010. Everyone knows it and it's too convenient - make account, add card and bank, pay wherever. Seller accounts seem to get shafted on the regular but they still keep using it.

Kukumber 4y ago

It's not, Stripe is the world before PayPal, annoying, and no protection against chargebacks/frauds, worse, you have to pay whenever it happen

dom96 4y ago

So what's a better alternative to PayPal and Stripe? Plaid? Square? Do these even offer the same services?

analog31 4y ago
I always keep an eye out, and haven't yet found an alternative to PP. My situation is that I sell a hardware gadget, and run my business from a passive web page. PP lets me create forms that link to their website, so they actually handle the transaction themselves. Most of the other services seem to start with: "Here's a sample of the code that you need to have running on your server." This liberates me from running a web server, having my own URL, or doing any kind of coding. I love coding, and do it all the time by day, but it would add a layer of complexity to my business that I don't need. PP has worked fine for me, but they always say that you should have a backup.
- coob 4y ago
  Stripe only requires you to drop some JavaScript on your page…
lucb1e 4y ago
Liberapay was the smoothest payment experience I ever had, but I don't know if you have to be a non-profit to be listed there or something. Other than that, I always appreciate when one can simply fall back to a bank transfer, then I can choose to just give them 100% of the money without risk to either party (no magic fraud detection, no cut going to paypal) at the cost of waiting a few days for the payment to be confirmed. So basically, just post your IBAN on your website please and offer to tick that as a payment option. No third party needed besides the bank account that you already need for running a business.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using bank transfers and being told that a payment has completed (even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant). So while this can work for a donation model, where the individual payments are not connected with access to services or goood, it really doesn't work where you (the provider of said services or goods) need to know that the payment has completed.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

I switched a site from WorldPay (hey remember those guys) to Stripe not long ago. Way lower charges. Way more finicky to integrate and yes the documentation is API reference not 'tutorial'. 100% agree about the weird error cases (to the extent I think I've still not handled them all) and the asynchronous stuff (which I kind of understand but also hate). Fortunately it's a business model where chargebacks are extremely unlikely so that's not affected us.

culiao 4y ago
Overall, are you happy with the switch?

dnet 4y ago

> After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped seizing people's money illegally. Flipper Zero project might disagree: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/flipper_zero/status/156719464... https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/

groffee 4y ago
Also https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-paypal-policy-lets-company-pull-2500-from-users-accounts-if-they-promote-misinformation https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-paypal-policy-lets-compan...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Already rescinded, with a bullshit line about how it was a mistake in the press release.
  - hobobaggins 4y ago
    Clearly not a mistake.
pessimizer 4y ago
And it seems like they're trying to experiment with new legal ways to seize funds, like a $2500 fine for offensive speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33062320
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Already rescinded. Please keep up.
  - kweks 4y ago
    The 2500$ fee isn't rescinded - it was only pulled for that specific case.

NorwegianDude 4y ago

I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks. Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard pricing, it's not 4 %... My experience over 10+ years using PayPal and 5+ years using Stripe is that Stripe has much better docs. Just had something stop working because PayPal changes their webhooks, and even their docs are wrong. Just a few hours ago a customer opened a PayPal claim, and now PayPal took the money hostage. The customer closed the claim, but the one case number the customer has resulted in 10 case numbers for me, and they are still open. When it comes to "friendly fraud" (customer buys something, and claims it was not them after receiving it), it would be hard to do a worse job than PayPal. If a customer opens e.g. 15 claims for unauthorized use, basically stating that someone else used their card, PayPal usually always agree with the customer on like 12 of them, while 3 of them PayPal think was legit. Sure PayPal, someone stole their PayPal account, purchased digital goods on my service on an account belonging to the PayPal owner that the PayPal owner clearly is using according to me and PayPal themself. Chargebacks usually costs money, but PayPal claims is basically just a click to take money from the seller, with no risk. So just that possibility makes PayPal much worse than Stripe. Stripe isn't perfect, but support is better and at least it's much more resistant to friendly fraud.

prirun 4y ago
> I think the author is mixing chargebacks with PayPal disputes/claims as PayPal also takes a fee for chargebacks. What the article says is that PayPal allows payers to request a refund, which is not a chargeback and is free to the vendor. Stripe does not have a dispute or refund process other than chargebacks and they charge vendors $15 for each according to the article.
Dawnyhff2 4y ago
hobobaggins 4y ago
> Also, one of the things that are wrong in this post is about Stripe rasar(fraud prevention). It's included in standard pricing, it's not 4 %... Radar is not free. https://stripe.com/radar/pricing https://stripe.com/radar/pricing

amelius 4y ago

Except they have better CSS.

nicgrev103 4y ago

I mainly use stripe because they have significantly lower transaction fees. 1.4% +20p vs 2.9% +30p UK

dangrossman 4y ago
I use a merchant account because it has significantly lower transaction fees, as low as 0.05% vs 2.9% for debit and check cards for example.

rippercushions 4y ago

I'm sure the business side has its problems, but as a consumer, I far prefer Stripe over PayPal. I've never had a payments problem with Stripe, while PayPal is consistently painful. I have a credit card issued by a bank in country X, but my home address both in reality and in bank X's records is in country Y. This seems to consistently trigger that fabled PayPal fraud protection the article mentions, making it impossible to enter my information correctly. After lots of poking about in the dark, I eventually figured out that the only way to make PayPal payments through this card is to set my country as "X" and enter a completely fictitious address in X with a separate delivery address in Y, after which the transaction sails through happily.

lucb1e 4y ago
I tried to pay with Stripe only once and it didn't let me. Can't live in Germany and provide a Dutch bank account. Should not make any difference within the Single Euro Payment Area. Sorry, DeepL, then I will have to continue to use the free version, I'm not missing any features anyway, I just wanted to pay for my use... (I also let support know but they didn't care of course.) PayPal required for a few years that I use a VPN for being allowed to log in. All the support could do for me was offer to close my Dutch account so that I could open a German account to use here. I hear that others have no problems using PayPal while on holiday abroad, so not sure what's up with that. Sometimes it also throws javascript errors and gets stuck on some loading icon. Plus all the horror stories about paypal. The things that always worked effortlessly for me were iDeal (collaboration of Dutch banks for online payments), regular bank transfers (always free in the SEPA zone, but takes 0-4 days depending on bank holidays and servers that take a weekend off), and direct debit (provide your name, address, and IBAN, such as at Liberapay, and everything will be arranged automatically). Basically, the European stuff simply works, not sure why.
dubcanada 4y ago
I've had problems with both, but at this very moment more problems with Stripe then PayPal. At least with PayPal if I sign up for a $10 a month plan I can go into PayPal via the very very difficult to find recurring transaction area and cancel said transaction. I cannot do that on Stripe. I strongly feel that I should be able to cancel ANY monthly transaction without having to go through the hoops and juggling act that is attempting to get the merchant to cancel said transaction. If I want to cancel a subscription why do I have to convince someone else to do it. Just let me cancel my stupid monthly subscription since everyone wants to do them.

nightpool 4y ago

This article is extremely confusing and filled with do many errors it's hard to even list them all. However, the bit I wanted to focus on was the author's claim that PayPal got "sued" and "stopped taking money from people". Getting sued is part of the ordinary course of business for a company like PayPal, and ~85% of lawsuits like that go nowhere, and result in no internal changes. The specific lawsuit the author seems to have been talking about was dismissed entirely by a judge in July, because the contact you sign with Facebook when you use their account explicitly forbids you from suing them instead of going through private arbitration proceedings: https://www.pokertube.com/article/chris-moneymaker-s-class-action-lawsuit-against-paypal-falls-at-first-hurdle https://www.pokertube.com/article/chris-moneymaker-s-class-a... (Chris Moneymaker's Class Action Lawsuit Against PayPal Falls At First Hurdle). And again, this is the kind of thing that happens to PayPal all the time. The fact that some random lawsuit that never even required a substantial reply from PayPal got picked up by Zed as evidence of their bad behavior "finally catching up to them" really erodes my confidence in the way he represents any of the other details in this article. What else is he misrepresenting or exaggerating?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Dawnyhff2 4y ago
xwowsersx 4y ago
"the contact you sign with Facebook"? I am so confused. Do you mean the contract you sign with PayPal?
- nightpool 4y ago
  Whoops, yes. I think I was talking to someone about Facebook in a different window when drafting this comment orz. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this reply in time to edit my comment. Thanks for pointing it out anyway :)
  - 4y ago

testfrequency 4y ago

Not even remotely comparable. - PayPal is trying to be a wallet for online payments - Stripe is payment infrastructure for the world

Dawnyhff2 4y ago

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

>After several lawsuits and years of backlash Paypal has stopped seizing people's money illegally. I still have no idea how this was not full on totally illegal, but I'm sure someone can explain to me how payment companies get away with keeping money that is clearly not theirs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32739950

BrainVirus 4y ago

The article is full of misrepresentations, some of which were already pointed out. One I have to point out myself: ">People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. So much so that they will refuse to give my small business money if it goes through Paypal on the off chance that those two guys might get some of it." This looks like pure spin. I don't know of anyone who refuses to use PayPal because of this reason. (Thiel and Musk are not running the company anymore.) I know a lot of people who refuse to use PayPal because it has some kind of directive to ban people for wrongthink. There are countless instances documented on ReclaimTheNet.org [1], and those are just the ones involving people of notoriety. [1] - https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal There is literally a campaign of people closing PayPal accounts in protest of company's behavior right now. (That $2,500 fine proposal was the last straw.) Guess what? Many people see "errors" when they try to close an account. Dark patterns everywhere. In short, if you choose to use PayPal as a sole payment method for your business, know that you are alienating a lot of potential customers.

dmix 4y ago
The Thiel and Musk thing is bizarre, I've never heard of anyone being worried about that. eBay bought Paypal in the 'Paypal Mafia' two decades ago in 2002 which is when most of them cashed out their stock. I highly, highly doubt their founder stock is still in any way connected to the various corporate iterations of Paypal that were sold and resold. Even 10 years ago this would be a silly thing to be concerned about. Paypal has enough real problems anyway.
hlandau 4y ago
Speaking personally, I refuse to use PayPal as a payment method because its payment form demands a phone number. Websites that only accept PayPal lose my business.

jgalt212 4y ago

> because Stripe clearly didn't care about fraud prevention But, they do like to write think pieces on it. https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/the-fraud-supply-chain/

JonoBB 4y ago

The one part of this article that I totally agree with is how terrible the API integration has become. In the early days, Stripe sold itself on a few things, one of which was the simplicity of integration. Since the whole PaymentIntents and SetupIntents introduction (along with the documentation fiasco that happened at the same time), integrating with Stripe is something like PayPal from 10 years ago. Its shit. PaymentIntents workflow (including the necessity to listen for webhooks) deserves a special place in hell. Its like they decided to copy Paypal IPN. I have used, recommended and intgrated Stripe to multiple businesses over the years (generating hundreds of US$ millions). For the past 2 years or so, I have migrated most of them away from Stripe, and any new integrations are done through other payment processors.

echelon 4y ago
I feel this comment. I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with. I couldn't find a single place advising which webhooks to listen to - or what their payloads should be - for simple subscription behavior. It's actually inconsistent in places. They built and accrued all of this complex billing behavior for all of these incredible upmarket needs, and in the meantime they forgot about the simple cases. I almost used PayPal or Square. Perhaps I should have. Stripe seems to have moved on to upmarket.
- koromak 4y ago
  I was lead to believe a stripe API integration would take maybe a month of my time, for a subscription based service. Genuinely 3 months of development, with more roadblocks than I could have ever imagined.
- jwr 4y ago
  > I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with. Braintree user here, have I got news for you. I regularly have to waste weeks of developer time on payment processing. The documentation is terrible and fragmented, some things are not explained anywhere, support response times hover around two weeks (I'm not kidding), and the canned support responses rarely fit my use case, so there's always a back-and-forth. This would all be fine if I could just get it done once, but the thing rears its head regularly, what with the newer PSD2 regulations or something else. As an example, after having done all the 3DS2 integration work (well, it was closer to re-work, as extensive changes were required), Braintree now tells me that 3DS1 is being deprecated (fine) and some of my transactions are 3DS1. Well, which ones, and WHY? I have no idea. I asked support on Sep 27, that was 12 days ago, no answer. I looked at Stripe and had a really hard time understanding how I can fit my subscription SaaS into it. I think if you fit the simplest common use case and you're willing to outsource everything, Stripe could be simple to use. If you want to be independent in any way, or want to maintain the relation to the customer yourself, things quickly get difficult. But the real reason why I can't even consider Stripe is multiple currencies: I want to settle in three currencies (including USD), and Stripe will only settle in USD to a bank account based in the US. Good luck getting a US bank account if you are an EU small business. Also, pricing looks reasonable at a first glance, until you notice the currency conversion fees and the extra "billing" fee. In my specific case I would end up at about 5.4%.

pierrebai 4y ago

Just as a contrary standpoint, I personally like to see the Paypal logo and the fact that it is Paypal processing my payment and not some I-roll-ed-my-own just-wait-for-me-get-hacked random system. I also learned to loathe stripe (and square) due to those PoS system that have ridiculously high tipping options even for transactions that really ought not to be tipping situation. No, I do not want to give 20% tips when buying bread over the counter at the bakery, thank you very much. (This may not be stripe fault, but the store owner. I resent both just to cover all bases.)

spinlock 4y ago
I used to tip the highest option at the “woke” coffee shop that I went to on the daily. Then, I asked the barista if she got the tips. She said the employees never saw any of those add on tips and I should give her cash if I wanted to tip _her_.
- danenania 4y ago
  In many cases, depending where you live, withholding tips like that would be illegal.
  - spinlock 4y ago
    It is. Illegal stuff happens all the time.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Wage theft is startlingly common, outweighing all other kinds of theft in the US. https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
- mellavora 4y ago
  Not disputing your story, but wouldn't the bad be on the business owner, not on the payment processor?

nottorp 4y ago

Hmm. All I understand is, should I ever try to sell something online, I should stay away from US based payment systems.

augasur 4y ago

Has anyone tried Paddle[1] both by integration and customer support? I have been looking at it for my future projects for quite some time. Fees seems to be a bit higher, but it also has both CC and PayPal integrations and can take care of the taxes. [1] https://www.paddle.com https://www.paddle.com

fiznool 4y ago
Not tried, but also researched thoroughly. The main difference as a ‘Merchant of Record’ is that they are effectively resellers of your product, and pay you a (majority) cut on all sales. As you mention, one of the big attractions for me is the fact they take care of local taxation laws - as a UK based seller I would be on the hook for calculating and charging VAT in all countries that I sell to, which is a massive headache / pain in the arse to get right. Much like the App Store, Paddle removes all of that, as a MoR they are your only ‘customer’ from an accountancy point of view. Of course, one of the big drawbacks here is conceding control of a critical part of your infrastructure to another organisation. Better hope they don’t hell ban you, or you’ll be totally screwed. But that seems to be an issue with whoever you choose.

blobbers 4y ago

The heresy of claiming the golden boys of YC, the Collison bros. could be running an evil company with a bad product! I jest I jest. ... I appreciate that the author is willing to write something counter to the narrative!

ta3411 4y ago

I am finding myself too locked in with Stripe Connect (we are building a marketplace) where Stripe is handling all KYC, onboarding, payment, and seller payout. Does anyone have any good recommendations on how to build redundancy into this? ie: receive payment via PayPal and build our own payout system

tyre 4y ago
(I work at Stripe.) With Connect, you can do onboarding flows yourself with the Custom plan. Note that information gathering and regulatory requirements for onboarding across dozens of countries is a huge amount of effort. We have whole teams working on this problem alone; not for the feint of heart. In the abstract we don’t care if you do onboarding or we do. Stripe doesn’t make money there. We offer a solution because it’s a difficult problem that we’re in a position to handle for users. With payouts you could do something similar. I believe there are platforms that pay everything out to one bank account and then pay out to customers themselves. I’m not an expert on these flows, but I believe it’s to cut down on foreign exchange fees—preventing multiple “hops”. We’re working on making this better.
- ta3411 4y ago
  Thank you for the candid response. To be honest, another main reason I want to implement other payment provider is in case Stripe Connect bans one of our sellers. My goal is to have an approved Stripe Connect account that's controlled by my company (the marketpalce) and pull some sellers, who don't want to go through Stripe onboarding/payout, under it. Then i will build a manual payout flow on top of it. Which platforms are you referring to? I would love to dive deeper in those.

MarkPNeyer 4y ago

Did a quick ctrl-f for 'bitcoin' here in the comments. Finding nothing. Just have to add: Lightning Network payments are ~free, ~instant, and as bearer instruments the merchants aren't responsible for fraud.

vinibrito 4y ago
Well, honestly I would love for us to have what bitcoin wants to be. I just sigh because we're still far from the "ideal bitcoin".

smakosh 4y ago

We actually got our fees refunded due to some fraudulent transactions in our marketplace which initially Stripe refused to refund

viggity 4y ago

Sometimes the ease of use is just too good to pass on, but you can make it easier for yourself to switch providers later by using a tokenizer so that you own the CC numbers without needing to bend over backwards to be PCI compliant. Makes it a million times easier to switch providers down the road. I just switched to Basis Theory (basistheory.com) and its stupid simple.

Mindey 4y ago

What about no-chargebacks policy? A recouping transaction instead, like in blockchains.