9 ms·

Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

382 points by gtaylor 15y ago

james33 15y ago
I don't really consider Stripe a replacement for PayPal. You don't accept PayPal because it can process credit cards, you accept PayPal because millions of people want to pay with it. Don't get me wrong, I hate PayPal just as much as the next guy, but unfortunately it isn't a viable option to stop using it in favor of simply accepting credit cards right now (though Stripe is an awesome product!).
- jinushaun 15y ago
  From the consumer's perspective: I don't want to give some random website my credit card info, but I'm OK with them going through PayPal for the checkout step.
- garyrichardson 15y ago
  Very true. Here's another example: My wife sells knitting related things (patterns, books, yarn) on ravelry.com. They collect the payment for her and transfer the money to her paypal account. I suspect it will be a while before stripe can do such a thing.
  - latchkey 15y ago
    If ravelry.com used WePay, each time someone bought one of her amazing works of art, the money would be deposited directly into a FDIC insured account that your wife controls. From there, your wife could transfer the money directly into her own regular bank account. If ravelry.com goes out of business before they transfer the money to her paypal account, there is no chance that they can take any of her money with them. (While highly illegal, I've seen this happen elsewhere with a similar setup.)
    - slashclee 15y ago
      *ravelry, not raverly
      - latchkey 15y ago
        Fixed. Thanks. Must be my old school raver roots. Heh.
        holdenk 15y ago
        raver you say? Do you know of any good bay area raves?
- gtaylor 15y ago
  I definitely understand the privacy concerns, and myself use PayPal for a lot of things. However, I think the need for it depends a lot on your audience, and the nature and reputation of your site. We are fortunate enough (being new and in closed beta) in that our audience knows who we are and that we're not a random sketch site. Down the road, we probably will have to support PayPal again (though very differently), but for now our current state (closed beta) and our business model allow Stripe and traditional payment gateway-only checkout. With that said, I will put a huge "YMMV" here! This is obviously not OK for every site, and the privacy concerns are very valid.
- angryasian 15y ago
  agree, I'd like to know conversion numbers after the switch.
  - gtaylor 15y ago
    It's still really early going, but we've seen some new patterns. For example, we had a customer enroll in four different courses (we help schools offer online courses) in under five minutes. This -never- happened when we only offered PayPal. Our current enrollment process is so fast and simple with Stripe that we're curious to see if our conversion rate is -better-, for our current audience (older, non-technical users at this point). While a $30-$90 course isn't an impulse buy, lowering the barrier to enrolling in more than one may leave us better off. But we'll be able to discuss that better after we have more data.
- pbreit 15y ago
  This is a good point. PayPal has moved beyond being a mere payment processor. There are a lot of shoppers (10s of millions at least) who actively prefer paying with PayPal.
jinushaun 15y ago
More positive news about Stripe since the last time they were posted on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883. I will give them a try on the next e-commerce project I work on.
latchkey 15y ago
WePay doesn't require you to redirect them to their site. https://www.wepay.com/developer/tutorial/iframe https://www.wepay.com/developer/tutorial/iframe
- gtaylor 15y ago
  Perhaps "redirect" wasn't the best word to use. WePay does interrupt the flow of your site with their own system, however: "The iframe checkout lets you embed an iframe on your own site that will contain the WePay checkout system." With Stripe, we have 100% control over presentational stuff during checkout.
  - latchkey 15y ago
    Sure, if you want that level of control. In my case, I was happy to not have to implement that part of things. It isn't a trivial amount of work to deal with the credit card / address forms and get everything correct. I made the iframe look like a part of my site well enough that people can trust it and it saves me a ton of development time. Your app appears to be in private beta, so I can't test that form to see if you missed anything and post about it here. ;-)
    - billclerico 15y ago
      hey guys - bill from wepay here. we contemplated building a JS solution as well, but using JS can place your site within the scope of PCI compliance. (this is somewhat up for debate) the reason we went with an iframe implementation is because it is firmly outside the scope of PCI, and we are working on making it even more customizable. either way, you are in good hands with stripe or wepay. (at wepay we are big stripe fans - they rule!) to me, the big difference is whether or not you want the money to settle to someone's bank account directly (stripe), or whether you want it aggregated and stored in an online account first (wepay).
dcaldwell 15y ago
From what I understand, one of the differences between WePay and Stripe is that WePay allows marketplace transactions where the app creator can take a cut of the transaction (similar to Paypal's adaptive payments API). I don't believe that Stripe allows marketplace transactions. WePay doesn't currently handle the dunning process for recurring payments but they plan to do so at the beginning of the year. Stripe currently handles the dunning process. At Bellstrike, we use WePay's API and have had nothing but good things to say about them. Their customer service is outstanding and we always have access to their developers, usually within minutes. We're getting ready to implement their iFrame solution as well. I've talked to some others that are using Stripe and they are pleased - particularly with the fact that Stripe only requires the credit card number and expiration date for a transaction - no other info. I guess it just depends on what you're looking for but I'd recommend WePay from my experience. We had a terrible time with PayPal.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  I too heard lots of great things about WePay. They seem like a great shop. As you've noted, there are some differences in feature sets on both sides. However, perhaps there will be some convergence in the future. Both services are very young, and improving very rapidly.
templaedhel 15y ago
The better question would be "why wouldn't you ditch paypal for stripe?" Stripe is much easier to integrate than the x.com/paypal.com family of conflicting api's, all of which lack easy to read documentation. https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c... Compared to https://stripe.com/docs https://stripe.com/docs Stripe doesn't have a history of randomly locking accounts, and even if they do (if you process payments, I can understand the legal need to now and then) their customer support is so responsive and helpful I wouldn't really mind. Stripe is easy to use. The web UI is fast, the api makes sense, I get joy out of it. Stripe sent me a real, physical letter, to thank me. I was one of the early users of the beta, and we all got real letters, on thick cardstock, I wish I had taken a picture of it. That may be a virtue of being a small userbase startup, but if you start with that mentality, it means a lot. Paypal does have slightly lower fees, but Stripe is worth it. Paypal also makes it easy to add a paypal pay button to sites, but those a fraught with stories of accounts shut down, and are ugly.
- michaelschade 15y ago
  I was one of the beta users too–I showed the letter to my co-founder and we both got huge smiles on our faces. Here's a picture of it: http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  I can only see two reasons why someone might need PayPal rather than Stripe: if the business resides outside the US, or if they need to take methods of payment other than credit cards. Other than that, Stripe seems like a no-brainer.
  - kenperkins 15y ago
    I'd love to use Stripe, however the 2.9% fee is a total deal breaker. I'm currently using Payflow Link (by PayPal and Verisign) and I pay a flat rate of $20 a month plus 500 incl monthly transactions. I can get more at 0.10 per transaction. And after that it's all done with my Merchant account, which I've been able to negotiate down below 2%. When you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more for you big guys) in credit card transactions, eating 1% just for a friendly API is a huge turnoff. Please Stripe, prove me wrong and provide an external merchant account option!
michaelschade 15y ago
The post is spot on. My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API (shudder) in the past. Stripe really sealed the deal though when I tweeted them to ask my first question about signup and one of the co-founders reached out to me. Since then, I've been in contact to share my feedback or ask other questions, and the quality and timing of their responses is one of the best I've ever seen. When a customer of ours had an issue placing his order, I wrote Stripe to see if they could offer any insight as to what errors they might be seeing on their end. While the error was unrelated to Stripe itself, they were so awesome that they actually took the initiative to browse through our checkout page and point out the spot that they thought to be the issue. A company that stands beside you when debugging your checkout page, maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs? That's customer support. I probably sound like I'm gushing right now, but I just have mad respect for this company. The product isn't the only thing that's top notch, the people behind it rock too.
- saurik 15y ago
  You almost always get amazing customer support from early stage companies. I'm certain people got amazing customer support from people high up at PayPal when it was just starting. You cannot judge a company on whether a co-founder responds to you on Twitter in a short period of time, and if you did, you should probably judge it negatively: I would wonder what was wrong with PayPal if someone that high up had enough time to be sitting around checking Twitter. (edit: I typed this over too long a period of time, and some of this post appeared after I had already submitted a draft with the above paragraph that received some upvotes, so I've now edited again to add this edit paragraph to explain that everything after this point was added after I received said upvotes. ;P) Also, I'm very curious about their API... I didn't see much information on chargebacks. Processors like Litle & Co make it very easy to fully automate the chargeback representment flow. PayPal, incidentally, does /not/ provide this either, but they do have APIs that let you (with only some hoops to get through bugs that I've filed with them, and we may see fixed fairly soon) correlate and track all of the chargebacks and how they relate to your transactions. Yet, when Stripe first started appearing on Hacker News, their website seemed to have almost no information on chargebacks. I asked after this, and the page "appeared" with an apology that it was supposedly there but not linked, but it then had very little information on it. I still (checking again now) see no information on how I'd determine /which/ transactions had chargebacks automatically: they seem to seriously rely on sending an e-mail? Why does their API page never once mention the word "chargeback"?
LeBlanc 15y ago
I'm the lead API engineer at WePay, so I'm definitely biased toward the WePay API, but I do think Stripe is a great service. The WePay API does allow you to embed the entire checkout experience on your own site with our iframe checkout. The iframe contents are customizable (header color, button color, etc), but as Greg mentions in the comments, it's not quite as customizable as Stripe or another merchant account based system. Unfortunately, even with Stripe, you are still liable for most of the PCI spec (our iframe checkout gets around this). We made a bet that there are a lot of developers out there that who are willing to give up a little on the customization side to not have to deal with the headache of PCI compliance (we've gone through that process ourselves and it is complicated and expensive).
- mrkurt 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, how does an embedded iframe let you avoid PCI completely and an external javascript lib not?
  - LeBlanc 15y ago
    The external javascript library is still being loaded on a page served from your domain, so it's totally possible for you to grab the credit card data and ajax it to your server (or for an XSS vulnerability to allow a 3rd party to send it somewhere). Since the CC info is accessible to both the client and Stripe, both are liable for PCI compliance. [edit: just to be clear, with stripe, you aren't liable for all of the PCI spec (just part), which is one of the awesome things about the service] With the iframe, the checkout form is served from WePay's domain, so javascript on your page can't directly access elements on the checkout form. There are still potential vulnerabilities such as clickjacking (we do some things to protect against this), but since the CC form is served from our domain, only we are liable for PCI compliance.
    - boucher 15y ago
      We at Stripe (and more importantly, our PCI auditors) don't agree with this assessment of how the chain of responsibility works. When you use Stripe.js, you need only serve your page over SSL and verify that you aren't collecting credit cards through other means to be PCI compliant.
irunbackwards 15y ago
I was absolutely enthralled with the support I received in their Campfire chat.
plasma 15y ago
Please come to Australia; I'd love to use Stripe for new projects.
hm2k 15y ago
https://twitter.com/#!/hm2k/statuses/119216249774411777 https://twitter.com/#!/hm2k/statuses/119216249774411777 https://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/119221741259206656 https://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/119221741259206656
moses1400 15y ago
We switched to Stripe from Paypal and Google Checkout a month ago and so far I've been very, very pleased. I plan to do a writeup of why we switched soon - wanted a bit more results first. FYI, Stripe launched a new web interface 2 days ago. The net bottom line was this: 1. our customers (business people who are not super tech savvy) just don't understand that you can pay with a credit card on paypal and google checkout requires a google account 2. the "go off and pay" somewhere else and come back to the main site is messy I have no real complaints with paypal over the years we used them so I can't bash them but I found that over time, we lost sales because people were confused. Now there is no more confusion - fill in a few fields and instantly you are done. We also considered Braintree which I was also impressed with but decided on Stripe because of the non-need for a merchant account. I am happy to answer any questions here or privately if needed.
- moses1400 15y ago
  BTW - I made a post about the switch for us: "Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I’ve Made to Date" http://www.centernetworks.com/stripe-from-paypal-google-checkout http://www.centernetworks.com/stripe-from-paypal-google-chec...
- philipsflat 15y ago
  Stripe does provide you with a merchant account (https://stripe.com/terms https://stripe.com/terms). They just make it a simple process by asking for as little info up front as possible. There's advantages to this such as a quicker sign up process. But the disadvantages are that you may have issues if your company grows too fast, if you get too large of a transaction size or a host of other risk issues. Your best protection against these is giving the bank the option to perform a thorough underwriting. Disclosure: I work at Braintree.
  - pc 15y ago
    I work at Stripe. This is pure FUD. If fast-growing companies really did encounter problems with Stripe, don't you think at least one would have talked about it?
adamtmca 15y ago
Can anyone recommend something similar to Stripe or WePay for Canadians.
foxylad 15y ago
The usual gripe - my company is based in New Zealand, and it's well nigh impossible to open a US bank account so we can't use Stripe or Wepay. I'd love to know how many of PayPal's merchants are non-resident, it's the only reason we use them. In fact, if it wasn't for PayPal non-US websites selling to the US would be almost impossible. The US has a massive advantage in that the rest of the world is happy to pay in US dollars, but US citizens won't pay in other currencies. So here's a very lucrative challenge, Stripe and Wepay: the one that figures out how to allow non-residents to set up an account first simply has to post the news to HN and will be flooded with new accounts. I'd switch within 24 hours if there was a viable alternative to PayPal.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  In tepid defense of US customers - even US banks can't really figure out foreign currency. We went to the bank in Bloomington, Indiana to exchange some Euros we had laying around and they literally had no way to handle them. The best they could offer was to mail them to American Express. Or drive to the airport in Indianapolis. And this wasn't a local bank, it was Chase Manhattan's branch in Bloomington. We ended up driving to the airport in Indy. No way am I just going to put a few hundred Euros in cash into the mail.
- aysar 15y ago
  Yup, i'd switch to either Stripe or WePay- tbh, being based in Canada... Stripe/WePay guys make it seem like we're foreigners o_O
mattmillr 15y ago
"We investigated some traditional payment processors like Braintree and Authorize.net ... A lot of traditional gateways have long, complicated setup processes, often involving sales calls and working with banks. ... They also typically require you to send credit card data through your servers, which means obtaining a level of PCI Compliance (not that we aren't already security-conscious)." I've used both of these. Braintree may not have been the right choice in their situation, but grouping them with Authorize.net for these reasons isn't really fair. Braintree's bundled merchant account and gateway services are much easier to set up, and their transparent redirect eliminates the need to handle card data on your own servers. And in my experience, their "We (heart) developers" motto is, well, true. They have really great, friendly support. Braintree and Authorize.net are miles apart. At least as far apart as Stripe and PayPal.
80cols 15y ago
Sounds like one of the main advantages of stripe is the API. I wonder if anyone is working on making payments platform-independent so it's easy to switch between payment providers.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  Most of the gateway-style services operate very similarly. We wrote some abstractions to allow us to eventually add Braintree or Authorize.net, since the payment cycles are much alike (from the API perspective). It only gets difficult when you try to mix-and-match something that uses redirects/iframes with services that deal directly with credit cards from your server to theirs. We just don't want to get into PCI audits and scans just yet, but once we do, we'll probably use Stripe's direct server->server APIs like Braintree/Authorize.net do instead of stripe.js.
ggwicz 15y ago
I'm not enough of a developer to integrate completely with stripe, but we've been making the change to Dwolla. Anything is better than PayPal. I appreciate their contributions to epayment, but their time has passed. Other great options out there include Square, MoneyBookers, and Dwolla (if anyone is looking to leave PayPal after this article and the recent Regretsy one).
treelovinhippie 15y ago
US only. The only reason I hate living in Australia.
- jandy 15y ago
  Or the UK. Bane of my existence.
  - Ankur84 15y ago
    We should setup a payments service that works everywhere, except the US. Revenge ... kidding. Although given how dodgy the PayPal APIs are and that future economic growth is likely to be based outside the US, it might be a very viable business.
_exec 15y ago
I cannot recommend Stripe enough. We will be posting a blog post about our (seamless, instant) transition very soon. Kudos! EDIT: By seamless, I mean "Sign up and get an API key", and by instant, I mean "Read this article, sign up, instant activation, plug in API keys, start charging, switch complete!"
alapshah 15y ago
I feel like I am becoming a ridiculous Samurai supporter in a world of Stripe supporters on HN (odd because we know they have many large customers), but my large (seasonal business, 8-figures a month for 5 months a year) contract employer chose Samurai last month and we've been very pleased. We still are splitting our transactions between them and another provider but we've been very satisfied w/ Samurai thus far and will probably migrate all of our transactions to them over the next couple of months. They have an amazing API - can do the stuff referenced in the above article... See: https://samurai.feefighters.com/developers/samurai-js https://samurai.feefighters.com/developers/samurai-js and were fantastic to work with. They also have a campfire room that is usually staffed and helpful I ended up choosing them for my non-day-job gig as well (saas business) and am very happy. Happy that both of these services exist, really.
pbreit 15y ago
I hear you. However I would like to point out that the two PayPal services I designed 10 years ago, Web Accept and IPN, continue to work in the same way they did a decade ago. I was fanatical about not breaking and not needing to version.
MattBearman 15y ago
I would love to be able to use stripe instead of PayPal, can't wait until it's available in the UK. Unfortunately they don't even have a timeline for availability outside of the US yet - http://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/144951134795218945 http://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/144951134795218945
wenbert 15y ago
Both WePay and Stripe are US only. https://www.wepay.com/Does-WePay-allow-international-non-US-payments https://www.wepay.com/Does-WePay-allow-international-non-US-... https://stripe.com/help/faq https://stripe.com/help/faq So for now, I am stuck with Paypal.
- decadentcactus 15y ago
  I'm starting to think though, that it's a good opportunity for others in other countries. Stripe, Twilio, Google Voice, probably a bunch of others.
ssgrfk 15y ago
Sigh. another great looking payments service thats only available in the US. doesn't anyone want my ruples?
kemo 15y ago
So how exactly do you replace Adaptive Payments with Stripe? I'm probably missing out on something here.. I know that flaming PayPal is popular nowadays but I can't find an alternative with both Authentication and Adaptive Payments (which our app is completely based on)
JulianMorrison 15y ago
Redirects are a good idea. Redirects mean that you don't have to juggle legally sensitive credit card data yourself, and your customers see a browser indication that they are talking to the genuine Paypal (or whomever). Paypal sucks, blocks your account and keeps your money on the least excuse, and is a bureaucratic hell, those are good reasons to not use them. Redirects aren't, IMO.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  You don't need to choose between safety and no redirects. One of the major points of the article is that you can not touch the credit card data yourself, AND still get a 100% uninterrupted payment experience for the user. Again, it's still early, but we are seeing better conversion rates so far. The PayPal redirect gave some of our less technical users fits.
phatbyte 15y ago
Why on earth Europe doesn't have something like Stripe or WePay ?? This is such an amazing opportunity, and I can see lots of people who would invest in it.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  Dealing with all of the banks, currency, and laws sounds like an absolute mess. Each country does business differently.
fastspring 15y ago
You may want to also consider SaaSy.com: - All-inclusive – hardly any development work needed - More functionality - GUI-based for the most part - Global tax/VAT management - Works with vendors in most any country - 10 currencies - 20 languages - Best customer service experience of your life
- gtaylor 15y ago
  To be perfectly honest, this is pretty far from the discussion. SaaSy looks expensive, and their website isn't even clear enough to see if they offer the redirect-less single payment checkout. I'm assuming this is just a shameless plug? Nothing wrong with that, but it looks like you don't even have the feature set the original article is discussing. Edit: Oh, I see what's going on: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fastspring http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fastspring
jakejake 15y ago
I'm eager to try stripe myself but it wasn't right for our business due to the transaction costs. We do anywhere from a quarter to half million per month in transaction fees and it's amazing how those fractions of a percent and one penny turn into thousands of dollars! We looked at losing about $20k per month so it didn't make sense. But I have a generic payment processor API that I wrote and I plan to add support for stripe into that for personal projects.
LilValleyBigEgo 15y ago
Why you'll be losing a lot of business
edawerd 15y ago
Can someone explain why Stripe doe not allow marketplace transactions but WePay does? Is this primarily due to issues of fraud? If so, how does WePay get around it?

382 points by gtaylor 15y ago

I don't really consider Stripe a replacement for PayPal. You don't accept PayPal because it can process credit cards, you accept PayPal because millions of people want to pay with it. Don't get me wrong, I hate PayPal just as much as the next guy, but unfortunately it isn't a viable option to stop using it in favor of simply accepting credit cards right now (though Stripe is an awesome product!).

jinushaun 15y ago
From the consumer's perspective: I don't want to give some random website my credit card info, but I'm OK with them going through PayPal for the checkout step.
garyrichardson 15y ago
Very true. Here's another example: My wife sells knitting related things (patterns, books, yarn) on ravelry.com. They collect the payment for her and transfer the money to her paypal account. I suspect it will be a while before stripe can do such a thing.
- latchkey 15y ago
  If ravelry.com used WePay, each time someone bought one of her amazing works of art, the money would be deposited directly into a FDIC insured account that your wife controls. From there, your wife could transfer the money directly into her own regular bank account. If ravelry.com goes out of business before they transfer the money to her paypal account, there is no chance that they can take any of her money with them. (While highly illegal, I've seen this happen elsewhere with a similar setup.)
  - slashclee 15y ago
    *ravelry, not raverly
    - latchkey 15y ago
      Fixed. Thanks. Must be my old school raver roots. Heh.
      - holdenk 15y ago
        raver you say? Do you know of any good bay area raves?
gtaylor 15y ago
I definitely understand the privacy concerns, and myself use PayPal for a lot of things. However, I think the need for it depends a lot on your audience, and the nature and reputation of your site. We are fortunate enough (being new and in closed beta) in that our audience knows who we are and that we're not a random sketch site. Down the road, we probably will have to support PayPal again (though very differently), but for now our current state (closed beta) and our business model allow Stripe and traditional payment gateway-only checkout. With that said, I will put a huge "YMMV" here! This is obviously not OK for every site, and the privacy concerns are very valid.
angryasian 15y ago
agree, I'd like to know conversion numbers after the switch.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  It's still really early going, but we've seen some new patterns. For example, we had a customer enroll in four different courses (we help schools offer online courses) in under five minutes. This -never- happened when we only offered PayPal. Our current enrollment process is so fast and simple with Stripe that we're curious to see if our conversion rate is -better-, for our current audience (older, non-technical users at this point). While a $30-$90 course isn't an impulse buy, lowering the barrier to enrolling in more than one may leave us better off. But we'll be able to discuss that better after we have more data.
pbreit 15y ago
This is a good point. PayPal has moved beyond being a mere payment processor. There are a lot of shoppers (10s of millions at least) who actively prefer paying with PayPal.

jinushaun 15y ago

More positive news about Stripe since the last time they were posted on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883. I will give them a try on the next e-commerce project I work on.

latchkey 15y ago

WePay doesn't require you to redirect them to their site. https://www.wepay.com/developer/tutorial/iframe https://www.wepay.com/developer/tutorial/iframe

gtaylor 15y ago
Perhaps "redirect" wasn't the best word to use. WePay does interrupt the flow of your site with their own system, however: "The iframe checkout lets you embed an iframe on your own site that will contain the WePay checkout system." With Stripe, we have 100% control over presentational stuff during checkout.
- latchkey 15y ago
  Sure, if you want that level of control. In my case, I was happy to not have to implement that part of things. It isn't a trivial amount of work to deal with the credit card / address forms and get everything correct. I made the iframe look like a part of my site well enough that people can trust it and it saves me a ton of development time. Your app appears to be in private beta, so I can't test that form to see if you missed anything and post about it here. ;-)
  - billclerico 15y ago
    hey guys - bill from wepay here. we contemplated building a JS solution as well, but using JS can place your site within the scope of PCI compliance. (this is somewhat up for debate) the reason we went with an iframe implementation is because it is firmly outside the scope of PCI, and we are working on making it even more customizable. either way, you are in good hands with stripe or wepay. (at wepay we are big stripe fans - they rule!) to me, the big difference is whether or not you want the money to settle to someone's bank account directly (stripe), or whether you want it aggregated and stored in an online account first (wepay).

dcaldwell 15y ago

From what I understand, one of the differences between WePay and Stripe is that WePay allows marketplace transactions where the app creator can take a cut of the transaction (similar to Paypal's adaptive payments API). I don't believe that Stripe allows marketplace transactions. WePay doesn't currently handle the dunning process for recurring payments but they plan to do so at the beginning of the year. Stripe currently handles the dunning process. At Bellstrike, we use WePay's API and have had nothing but good things to say about them. Their customer service is outstanding and we always have access to their developers, usually within minutes. We're getting ready to implement their iFrame solution as well. I've talked to some others that are using Stripe and they are pleased - particularly with the fact that Stripe only requires the credit card number and expiration date for a transaction - no other info. I guess it just depends on what you're looking for but I'd recommend WePay from my experience. We had a terrible time with PayPal.

gtaylor 15y ago
I too heard lots of great things about WePay. They seem like a great shop. As you've noted, there are some differences in feature sets on both sides. However, perhaps there will be some convergence in the future. Both services are very young, and improving very rapidly.

templaedhel 15y ago

The better question would be "why wouldn't you ditch paypal for stripe?" Stripe is much easier to integrate than the x.com/paypal.com family of conflicting api's, all of which lack easy to read documentation. https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c... Compared to https://stripe.com/docs https://stripe.com/docs Stripe doesn't have a history of randomly locking accounts, and even if they do (if you process payments, I can understand the legal need to now and then) their customer support is so responsive and helpful I wouldn't really mind. Stripe is easy to use. The web UI is fast, the api makes sense, I get joy out of it. Stripe sent me a real, physical letter, to thank me. I was one of the early users of the beta, and we all got real letters, on thick cardstock, I wish I had taken a picture of it. That may be a virtue of being a small userbase startup, but if you start with that mentality, it means a lot. Paypal does have slightly lower fees, but Stripe is worth it. Paypal also makes it easy to add a paypal pay button to sites, but those a fraught with stories of accounts shut down, and are ugly.

michaelschade 15y ago
I was one of the beta users too–I showed the letter to my co-founder and we both got huge smiles on our faces. Here's a picture of it: http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j
JoshTriplett 15y ago
I can only see two reasons why someone might need PayPal rather than Stripe: if the business resides outside the US, or if they need to take methods of payment other than credit cards. Other than that, Stripe seems like a no-brainer.
- kenperkins 15y ago
  I'd love to use Stripe, however the 2.9% fee is a total deal breaker. I'm currently using Payflow Link (by PayPal and Verisign) and I pay a flat rate of $20 a month plus 500 incl monthly transactions. I can get more at 0.10 per transaction. And after that it's all done with my Merchant account, which I've been able to negotiate down below 2%. When you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more for you big guys) in credit card transactions, eating 1% just for a friendly API is a huge turnoff. Please Stripe, prove me wrong and provide an external merchant account option!

michaelschade 15y ago

The post is spot on. My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API (shudder) in the past. Stripe really sealed the deal though when I tweeted them to ask my first question about signup and one of the co-founders reached out to me. Since then, I've been in contact to share my feedback or ask other questions, and the quality and timing of their responses is one of the best I've ever seen. When a customer of ours had an issue placing his order, I wrote Stripe to see if they could offer any insight as to what errors they might be seeing on their end. While the error was unrelated to Stripe itself, they were so awesome that they actually took the initiative to browse through our checkout page and point out the spot that they thought to be the issue. A company that stands beside you when debugging your checkout page, maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs? That's customer support. I probably sound like I'm gushing right now, but I just have mad respect for this company. The product isn't the only thing that's top notch, the people behind it rock too.

saurik 15y ago
You almost always get amazing customer support from early stage companies. I'm certain people got amazing customer support from people high up at PayPal when it was just starting. You cannot judge a company on whether a co-founder responds to you on Twitter in a short period of time, and if you did, you should probably judge it negatively: I would wonder what was wrong with PayPal if someone that high up had enough time to be sitting around checking Twitter. (edit: I typed this over too long a period of time, and some of this post appeared after I had already submitted a draft with the above paragraph that received some upvotes, so I've now edited again to add this edit paragraph to explain that everything after this point was added after I received said upvotes. ;P) Also, I'm very curious about their API... I didn't see much information on chargebacks. Processors like Litle & Co make it very easy to fully automate the chargeback representment flow. PayPal, incidentally, does /not/ provide this either, but they do have APIs that let you (with only some hoops to get through bugs that I've filed with them, and we may see fixed fairly soon) correlate and track all of the chargebacks and how they relate to your transactions. Yet, when Stripe first started appearing on Hacker News, their website seemed to have almost no information on chargebacks. I asked after this, and the page "appeared" with an apology that it was supposedly there but not linked, but it then had very little information on it. I still (checking again now) see no information on how I'd determine /which/ transactions had chargebacks automatically: they seem to seriously rely on sending an e-mail? Why does their API page never once mention the word "chargeback"?

LeBlanc 15y ago

I'm the lead API engineer at WePay, so I'm definitely biased toward the WePay API, but I do think Stripe is a great service. The WePay API does allow you to embed the entire checkout experience on your own site with our iframe checkout. The iframe contents are customizable (header color, button color, etc), but as Greg mentions in the comments, it's not quite as customizable as Stripe or another merchant account based system. Unfortunately, even with Stripe, you are still liable for most of the PCI spec (our iframe checkout gets around this). We made a bet that there are a lot of developers out there that who are willing to give up a little on the customization side to not have to deal with the headache of PCI compliance (we've gone through that process ourselves and it is complicated and expensive).

mrkurt 15y ago
Out of curiosity, how does an embedded iframe let you avoid PCI completely and an external javascript lib not?
- LeBlanc 15y ago
  The external javascript library is still being loaded on a page served from your domain, so it's totally possible for you to grab the credit card data and ajax it to your server (or for an XSS vulnerability to allow a 3rd party to send it somewhere). Since the CC info is accessible to both the client and Stripe, both are liable for PCI compliance. [edit: just to be clear, with stripe, you aren't liable for all of the PCI spec (just part), which is one of the awesome things about the service] With the iframe, the checkout form is served from WePay's domain, so javascript on your page can't directly access elements on the checkout form. There are still potential vulnerabilities such as clickjacking (we do some things to protect against this), but since the CC form is served from our domain, only we are liable for PCI compliance.
  - boucher 15y ago
    We at Stripe (and more importantly, our PCI auditors) don't agree with this assessment of how the chain of responsibility works. When you use Stripe.js, you need only serve your page over SSL and verify that you aren't collecting credit cards through other means to be PCI compliant.

irunbackwards 15y ago

I was absolutely enthralled with the support I received in their Campfire chat.

plasma 15y ago

Please come to Australia; I'd love to use Stripe for new projects.

hm2k 15y ago

https://twitter.com/#!/hm2k/statuses/119216249774411777 https://twitter.com/#!/hm2k/statuses/119216249774411777 https://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/119221741259206656 https://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/119221741259206656

moses1400 15y ago

We switched to Stripe from Paypal and Google Checkout a month ago and so far I've been very, very pleased. I plan to do a writeup of why we switched soon - wanted a bit more results first. FYI, Stripe launched a new web interface 2 days ago. The net bottom line was this: 1. our customers (business people who are not super tech savvy) just don't understand that you can pay with a credit card on paypal and google checkout requires a google account 2. the "go off and pay" somewhere else and come back to the main site is messy I have no real complaints with paypal over the years we used them so I can't bash them but I found that over time, we lost sales because people were confused. Now there is no more confusion - fill in a few fields and instantly you are done. We also considered Braintree which I was also impressed with but decided on Stripe because of the non-need for a merchant account. I am happy to answer any questions here or privately if needed.

moses1400 15y ago
BTW - I made a post about the switch for us: "Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I’ve Made to Date" http://www.centernetworks.com/stripe-from-paypal-google-checkout http://www.centernetworks.com/stripe-from-paypal-google-chec...
philipsflat 15y ago
Stripe does provide you with a merchant account (https://stripe.com/terms https://stripe.com/terms). They just make it a simple process by asking for as little info up front as possible. There's advantages to this such as a quicker sign up process. But the disadvantages are that you may have issues if your company grows too fast, if you get too large of a transaction size or a host of other risk issues. Your best protection against these is giving the bank the option to perform a thorough underwriting. Disclosure: I work at Braintree.
- pc 15y ago
  I work at Stripe. This is pure FUD. If fast-growing companies really did encounter problems with Stripe, don't you think at least one would have talked about it?

adamtmca 15y ago

Can anyone recommend something similar to Stripe or WePay for Canadians.

foxylad 15y ago

The usual gripe - my company is based in New Zealand, and it's well nigh impossible to open a US bank account so we can't use Stripe or Wepay. I'd love to know how many of PayPal's merchants are non-resident, it's the only reason we use them. In fact, if it wasn't for PayPal non-US websites selling to the US would be almost impossible. The US has a massive advantage in that the rest of the world is happy to pay in US dollars, but US citizens won't pay in other currencies. So here's a very lucrative challenge, Stripe and Wepay: the one that figures out how to allow non-residents to set up an account first simply has to post the news to HN and will be flooded with new accounts. I'd switch within 24 hours if there was a viable alternative to PayPal.

Vivtek 15y ago
In tepid defense of US customers - even US banks can't really figure out foreign currency. We went to the bank in Bloomington, Indiana to exchange some Euros we had laying around and they literally had no way to handle them. The best they could offer was to mail them to American Express. Or drive to the airport in Indianapolis. And this wasn't a local bank, it was Chase Manhattan's branch in Bloomington. We ended up driving to the airport in Indy. No way am I just going to put a few hundred Euros in cash into the mail.
aysar 15y ago
Yup, i'd switch to either Stripe or WePay- tbh, being based in Canada... Stripe/WePay guys make it seem like we're foreigners o_O

mattmillr 15y ago

"We investigated some traditional payment processors like Braintree and Authorize.net ... A lot of traditional gateways have long, complicated setup processes, often involving sales calls and working with banks. ... They also typically require you to send credit card data through your servers, which means obtaining a level of PCI Compliance (not that we aren't already security-conscious)." I've used both of these. Braintree may not have been the right choice in their situation, but grouping them with Authorize.net for these reasons isn't really fair. Braintree's bundled merchant account and gateway services are much easier to set up, and their transparent redirect eliminates the need to handle card data on your own servers. And in my experience, their "We (heart) developers" motto is, well, true. They have really great, friendly support. Braintree and Authorize.net are miles apart. At least as far apart as Stripe and PayPal.

80cols 15y ago

Sounds like one of the main advantages of stripe is the API. I wonder if anyone is working on making payments platform-independent so it's easy to switch between payment providers.

gtaylor 15y ago
Most of the gateway-style services operate very similarly. We wrote some abstractions to allow us to eventually add Braintree or Authorize.net, since the payment cycles are much alike (from the API perspective). It only gets difficult when you try to mix-and-match something that uses redirects/iframes with services that deal directly with credit cards from your server to theirs. We just don't want to get into PCI audits and scans just yet, but once we do, we'll probably use Stripe's direct server->server APIs like Braintree/Authorize.net do instead of stripe.js.

ggwicz 15y ago

I'm not enough of a developer to integrate completely with stripe, but we've been making the change to Dwolla. Anything is better than PayPal. I appreciate their contributions to epayment, but their time has passed. Other great options out there include Square, MoneyBookers, and Dwolla (if anyone is looking to leave PayPal after this article and the recent Regretsy one).

treelovinhippie 15y ago

US only. The only reason I hate living in Australia.

jandy 15y ago
Or the UK. Bane of my existence.
- Ankur84 15y ago
  We should setup a payments service that works everywhere, except the US. Revenge ... kidding. Although given how dodgy the PayPal APIs are and that future economic growth is likely to be based outside the US, it might be a very viable business.

_exec 15y ago

I cannot recommend Stripe enough. We will be posting a blog post about our (seamless, instant) transition very soon. Kudos! EDIT: By seamless, I mean "Sign up and get an API key", and by instant, I mean "Read this article, sign up, instant activation, plug in API keys, start charging, switch complete!"

alapshah 15y ago

I feel like I am becoming a ridiculous Samurai supporter in a world of Stripe supporters on HN (odd because we know they have many large customers), but my large (seasonal business, 8-figures a month for 5 months a year) contract employer chose Samurai last month and we've been very pleased. We still are splitting our transactions between them and another provider but we've been very satisfied w/ Samurai thus far and will probably migrate all of our transactions to them over the next couple of months. They have an amazing API - can do the stuff referenced in the above article... See: https://samurai.feefighters.com/developers/samurai-js https://samurai.feefighters.com/developers/samurai-js and were fantastic to work with. They also have a campfire room that is usually staffed and helpful I ended up choosing them for my non-day-job gig as well (saas business) and am very happy. Happy that both of these services exist, really.

pbreit 15y ago

I hear you. However I would like to point out that the two PayPal services I designed 10 years ago, Web Accept and IPN, continue to work in the same way they did a decade ago. I was fanatical about not breaking and not needing to version.

MattBearman 15y ago

I would love to be able to use stripe instead of PayPal, can't wait until it's available in the UK. Unfortunately they don't even have a timeline for availability outside of the US yet - http://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/144951134795218945 http://twitter.com/#!/stripe/status/144951134795218945

wenbert 15y ago

Both WePay and Stripe are US only. https://www.wepay.com/Does-WePay-allow-international-non-US-payments https://www.wepay.com/Does-WePay-allow-international-non-US-... https://stripe.com/help/faq https://stripe.com/help/faq So for now, I am stuck with Paypal.

decadentcactus 15y ago
I'm starting to think though, that it's a good opportunity for others in other countries. Stripe, Twilio, Google Voice, probably a bunch of others.

ssgrfk 15y ago

Sigh. another great looking payments service thats only available in the US. doesn't anyone want my ruples?

kemo 15y ago

So how exactly do you replace Adaptive Payments with Stripe? I'm probably missing out on something here.. I know that flaming PayPal is popular nowadays but I can't find an alternative with both Authentication and Adaptive Payments (which our app is completely based on)

JulianMorrison 15y ago

Redirects are a good idea. Redirects mean that you don't have to juggle legally sensitive credit card data yourself, and your customers see a browser indication that they are talking to the genuine Paypal (or whomever). Paypal sucks, blocks your account and keeps your money on the least excuse, and is a bureaucratic hell, those are good reasons to not use them. Redirects aren't, IMO.

gtaylor 15y ago
You don't need to choose between safety and no redirects. One of the major points of the article is that you can not touch the credit card data yourself, AND still get a 100% uninterrupted payment experience for the user. Again, it's still early, but we are seeing better conversion rates so far. The PayPal redirect gave some of our less technical users fits.

phatbyte 15y ago

Why on earth Europe doesn't have something like Stripe or WePay ?? This is such an amazing opportunity, and I can see lots of people who would invest in it.

gtaylor 15y ago
Dealing with all of the banks, currency, and laws sounds like an absolute mess. Each country does business differently.

fastspring 15y ago

You may want to also consider SaaSy.com: - All-inclusive – hardly any development work needed - More functionality - GUI-based for the most part - Global tax/VAT management - Works with vendors in most any country - 10 currencies - 20 languages - Best customer service experience of your life

gtaylor 15y ago
To be perfectly honest, this is pretty far from the discussion. SaaSy looks expensive, and their website isn't even clear enough to see if they offer the redirect-less single payment checkout. I'm assuming this is just a shameless plug? Nothing wrong with that, but it looks like you don't even have the feature set the original article is discussing. Edit: Oh, I see what's going on: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fastspring http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fastspring

jakejake 15y ago

I'm eager to try stripe myself but it wasn't right for our business due to the transaction costs. We do anywhere from a quarter to half million per month in transaction fees and it's amazing how those fractions of a percent and one penny turn into thousands of dollars! We looked at losing about $20k per month so it didn't make sense. But I have a generic payment processor API that I wrote and I plan to add support for stripe into that for personal projects.

LilValleyBigEgo 15y ago

Why you'll be losing a lot of business

edawerd 15y ago

Can someone explain why Stripe doe not allow marketplace transactions but WePay does? Is this primarily due to issues of fraud? If so, how does WePay get around it?