16 ms·

Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

409 points by craigkerstiens 14y ago

brittohalloran 14y ago
"Suffice it to say there is a) a customer group which needs between 8 and 15 cards and b) they really, really like pretty checkouts." I think this is more "people who are on the margin where they MIGHT be interested in paying for more cards can be convinced when they hit the pretty checkout page". If you don't need more than 15 cards, you probably don't have a burning need for the paid version.
bazookaBen 14y ago
have to admit, that one of the reasons patio11 got Patrick (cofounder of Stripe) to help with customer support is because he's *the patio11 but great customer service is still great, no matter what.
- naz 14y ago
  Patrick is in the support rotation like most of us at Stripe. He'll answer your email too if you send it on the right day.
  - sachinag 14y ago
    I would be very interested in how do you do ticket handoffs/tracking across multiple non-dedicated support people in your rotation.
  - bazookaBen 14y ago
    thanks for the clarification
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- brown9-2 14y ago
  How do you know this for a fact?
  - pg_bot 14y ago
    (More anecdotal evidence) Patrick Collison also helped me out when I was implementing Stripe on my site, and I am just a regular joe.
sulife 14y ago
Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Doesn't that cost way, way too much as a one-off fee? I'd rather pay a small percentage more on each sale, as I don't have that many sales. Also, getting a merchant account appears to be too much of a hassle.
  - sulife 14y ago
    Uhhh, what do you mean? Go through Chase paymentech is like 1.9% or so for card not present.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      I mean to set up. Also, I'm not in the US, does that work in the UK?
      - sulife 14y ago
        No clue about UK
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  That's certainly not been my experience with setting up online billing through authorize.net (or braintree for that matter). Integration is easy enough, it's the screwing around with getting a merchant account that's a pita. Plus, if you're a startup, you don't really know how much you're going to be selling (or not selling). It's a good idea to keep associated costs variable until you have some better benchmarks. Stripe is unquestionably the fastest, easiest way to be able to accept credit card payments online without making yourself look like an amateur by having google checkout or the like. Not having to go through the process of getting a merchant account--and the way their fees are structured--has been a huge time and sanity saver for me, both for myself and for projects I've worked on.
TomGullen 14y ago
> This means that their credit card details never hit your server. One thing I've been seeing recently is that some implementations using Stripe DO have the CC details hitting their server. The most common case being when Javascript is disabled the form posts to the website because the developer didn't design with graceful degradation, a dangerous mistake when mixed with credit card numbers. It doesn't appear to be a problem for you (your payment page for CC info doesn't gracefully degrade with JS disabled and is impassible - you might want to fix that!) but I've seen it on other sites, and it's especially a problem when other sites don't use SSL as a fail safe for this sort of case which I have also seen. For Stripe it might perhaps be worth considering denying all payments from non HTTPS pages for this reason. It forces the merchants to have an SSL failsafe. Also with CC info being entered on your site, it's presumably trivial for the site itself to record the CC numbers. Trust is the issue here, I'm not going to be entering my CC number on a site I've never heard of, with no reputation. Stripe doesn't solve this issue, Paypal does. Stripe looks wonderful, but it's not going to be suitable for everyone.
- MBCook 14y ago
  I worked on something with credit card processing a few years ago. As I remember, it doesn't really matter if the details hit your server, but the point is you absolutely can not save them. No putting them in a DB, no putting the in a log file (not even the last four or something like that), nothing. So if your form takes the numbers in, you make an API call, and then you blank them in memory you were OK. If you put them in the user's session, you were in trouble. It's all insanely complicated, and the only good solution is "don't do it." There's a good reason people use things like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net's CIM (where they store it and certify that they are PCI compliant).
  - saikat 14y ago
    To make sure there isn't confusion here, having card details go through your server, even if you aren't saving them, still can lead to certain PCI compliance burdens (e.g. you may need to get an audit from a PCI auditor verifying this). Having the card never go to your server is the best way to make sure you are PCI compliant, as you mention.
lrem 14y ago
Just curious: are there any good options outside the US?
- TomGullen 14y ago
  Basically, no. (I'm in the UK and am poised to jump to Stripe as soon as it becomes available).
  - alexmunroe 14y ago
    There is the option of GoCardless (https://gocardless.com/ https://gocardless.com/) in the UK, however they use the Direct Debit system rather than card processing which does somewhat limit you geographically.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
      Aren't they really the "Anti-Stripe" more akin to Dwolla? Banish Credit Cards altogether? Also, I heard there were changes in European direct deposit/ACH laws (the approach Gocardless takes) that will allow them to be European, not just UK, very soon.
- vampirechicken 14y ago
  2checkout is an option for payments outside the US. They are a bit pricey, but they're one of the few international payment processors around, and have very good customer support, both for buyers and sellers. [I used to work for 2co. I don't any more.]
- jusben1369 14y ago
  At Spreedly Core we see a lot of European and Asia Pacific customers sign up due to our API and flexibility to change gateways. However, no one outside of Stripe (and so far Stripe is the only one in the US) who has nailed the instant sign up piece.
- philoye 14y ago
  In Australia, Pin (https://pin.net.au https://pin.net.au) is very similar service: no merchant account required, nice API.
StavrosK 14y ago
God I hate posts about Stripe with a passion. It's like saying "You've had this pain in your back for the last five years? Well, I've got this miracle pill here that will not only make it go away, but it will also taste great. Oh, you're not in the US? Too bad then." Stop reminding me I can't use Stripe all the time.
- dmix 14y ago
  Stripe is beta testing internationally. I got an account in Canada about 2 weeks ago. http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-expansion-2012-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-e...
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Fantastic, how do I go about applying, do you know?
    - dmix 14y ago
      https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        Done, thank you.
  - corkill 14y ago
    Great to hear, I'm just praying they remove the need for a social security number in the US. One of the main reasons we chose the US to incorporate in was for access to business tools like this. But with neither founder having a SS number we can't use the service.
    - davidcuddeback 14y ago
      If you're signing up as a business, can't you provide an EIN instead of a SSN? I see the box for it in their account settings page, but since I'm using it as an individual, I haven't been able to test whether that works without an SSN.
MarkMc 14y ago
In case anyone is curious, here's Patrick's sales graph: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month You can see the big jump in May-July (although the jump for July is 32%, not 53%)
- patio11 14y ago
  Oopsie. Thanks for the correction.
  - brador 14y ago
    Patrick, just noticed your Adwords spend went from $1000's to $0 suddenly. Looks like a disaster. What happened? Is Adwords no longer viable?
    - patio11 14y ago
      I got married. Lots of balls to juggle. "Send credit card statements to VA for entry into the bookkeeping software which automatically populates a few stats on the BCC website" wasn't very high on the list. My actual spend is probably as high as ever, but "Log into AdWords to check" also hasn't been high on the list.
      - akldfgj 14y ago
        VA?
        ovi256 14y ago
        Virtual assistant. Cheap off-shore outsourcing via the internet, a staple of lean startup.
jeremymcanally 14y ago
Stripe the service is fantastic. I just hope they can get the financial side together soon. They sent me a 1099 on April 14 this year (you know, one day before taxes are due). Fortunately I hadn't filed yet (I was literally typing everything in TurboTax as the postman came). Not only was that usually illegal (at least for traditional 1099's; I don't know if the same rules apply to 1099-K's...haven't looked), it was highly annoying as it was also the second one they sent me (each with a different amount). Turns out they'd switched payment processors or something at one point and didn't bother to tell their customers to expect two 1099's. Still using it. Great product. But I had to file an extension and crap to get it all sorted out, which was highly annoying.
- pc 14y ago
  Yeah, we just messed this up. I'm very sorry. I'm literally walking to a meeting with a user, but I'll follow up and edit this comment with details and what we're doing to prevent it within the next three hours. [Update:] So, the background here is that 1099 reporting rules changed last year. A lot of companies—including some of our partners—didn't yet have their infrastructure in place to properly handle them. A lot has been written about the change in the law (search "2011 1099 confusion" for a small sample), and there's been a fair amount of ambiguity and confusion overall (Citibank issued 1099s for frequent flyer miles; whether this was necessary isn't yet clear). Due to this confusion, the IRS actually backed off plans to require the reconciliation of Form 1099K in tax returns filed for 2011. In Stripe's case, one of our banking partners responsible for the filings was unable to meet the original filing date for all 1099s. While they filed a proper extension with the IRS, this meant that receipt of your 1099 was delayed. As you point out, we should have done a much better job communicating this at each step -- and, obviously, receiving tax forms in mid-April is not an acceptable outcome regardless. We are working on controlling the process much more closely ourselves next year so that this does not happen again. But the bottom line is: sorry. We built Stripe to make this kind of hassle go away, and we're doing everything we can to make sure that this was a one-off blip.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Do payment processors even have to send you 1099? If I'm not mistaken, Google Checkout and PayPal did not send me 1099 - I just had to report all the revenue received from them myself.
Irishsteve 14y ago
Stripe is a great service, but I get the feeling their PR company or marketing department promotes extensively here (Makes sense since its the target audience).
- patio11 14y ago
  Dang, sinister plan revealed: I am in fact a sleeper agent sent back from 2016 to 2006 with the instructions to build the most unlikely business possible, gather 75k karma, and then pave the way for my shadowy masters to get on HN. Seriously: they're on my blog because of the reasons in the post. My blog's on HN because, well, that's a complicated topic but suffice it to say that it happens with a fair degree of regularity.
- saikat 14y ago
  For what it's worth, we don't have a PR company or marketing department currently =). We try not to post on HN unless we actually think people on HN will like the content (and we've argued internally before and decided not to post stuff to HN because it didn't seem useful enough).
  - Irishsteve 14y ago
    Eh, I wasn't meant to be so cynical (It just came across that way because I suppose I am!)
stevoski 14y ago
I currently use FastSpring to handle purchases of my software. What's the advantage to using Stripe instead of FastSpring?
- corkill 14y ago
  Depending on your volume a lot of cash. Fast Spring is 5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order. Stripe 2.9% + 30 cents.
  - sulife 14y ago
    Chase Paymentech - ~1.9% + $0.15 <---- WINNER!
    - davidandgoliath 14y ago
      Stripe would end up costing an additional $20,000 a year or thereabouts for us. Due to their instant sign-up and almost instant approval however, they were the only option for a quickfix while we await chase or braintree to approve our applications. :) Love their UI & easy integration though.
      - sulife 14y ago
        Chase usually takes me < 24 hrs for VAR sheet...
- metadata 14y ago
  Stripe allows you to charge customer on your site instead of redirecting her to other domain to fill out the purchase form. So, you lose track of your website visitor in a very important moment. If purchase never occurs, you have no idea why. On the other hand, with Stripe you have full control of complete purchasing experience, can experiment with various designs and flows - and measure everything. That enables huge gains with rigorous A/B testing, as Patrick explained.
- fastspring 14y ago
  Dan, FastSpring’s CEO, here. That’s a good question. With FastSpring, you don’t lose track of your site visitors because we support cross-domain tracking. When a purchase doesn’t complete, you can see the order issues and resolve them as appropriate. You can experiment with various designs and flows because FastSpring order pages are highly flexible and customizable in terms of how the order flow can look, placement of various elements on the order page, etc. and A/B testing is supported. FastSpring all-inclusive, turnkey functionality is mainly UI based. Little coding is needed, it’s all there – functionality you need to launch and functionality you need to grow and maximize the business and its revenue. FastSpring pricing of its all-inclusive service includes the higher processing costs inherent in international transactions, Amex transactions, and certain alternative payment methods. Here are some advantages to FastSpring: FastSpring works with developers and companies located anywhere US companies are authorized to do business, handles global tax compliance and tax payment management including for VAT, enables end users to pay using their localized currency to avoid bank/exchange fees and a poor US/USD-centric user experience, provides an order page localized in 20+ languages, has PayPal integrated, lets you skip the PCI Assessment Questionnaire, offers fraud prevention, a built-in shopping cart, Google Analytics and marketing ad campaign tracking integration, an unlimited number of easy to setup post-order notifications, designs an order page to match the look and feel of the other pages of the developer’s website, offers merchandising features for cross and upselling to maximize the average order size and optimizer order conversion, built-in notifications, a future bill testing GUI, pre-bill notifications for annual subscriptions, reseller and affiliate management, user role mgmt. & change tracking, consulting for SEO/PPC/Affiliate marketing/Online marketing/order page optimization, one-time purchases in addition to recurring billing, among other advantages. Hope that's helpful with your comparison.
paranoiacblack 14y ago
I've never heard of this service before but it looks quite interesting. I wonder though, how feasible is something like this for paying membership dues in a small club, for example? Is there some other service does this a lot better?
- paulbaumgart 14y ago
  WePay makes that particular use-case very convenient IME.
deleted 14y ago
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dcaldwell 14y ago
I work in the same co-working facility as an education-based startup that switched from using PayPal(where user gets redirected to PayPal) to Stripe (completely branded checkout) and their conversion rates increased 40% overnight and have stayed at those levels. After digging into their API, we're actually building our new company, MoonClerk, on top of Stripe's API. We'll basically be an abstraction layer on top of Stripe so that non-developers can use it and implement it on their site, with a focus on recurring payments (even though we do one-time payments). We really want to allow non-developers the ability to use Stripe.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  How is this possible? Through Paypal customers can also pay with credit cards, and even more. They can use checks, or bank transfers (very important in Europe where credit cards are not as popular), etc. Why would usage of Paypal decrease conversion compared to pure credit cards? My guess is that a lot of customers don't know what Paypal is and don't realize they can just use their credit card.
  - joeblubaugh 14y ago
    And the PayPal flow is godawful - direct to a new page, get prompted to: 1. Log in. 2. Create Account. 3. Enter payment deets. (Small text near bottom of page, not always available, depending on the merchant). Even if you have an account, they don't consistently keep my default payment method - often switching back to my bank account even when I've made a CC my default. This all adds up to a level of friction that I hate, hate, hate, hate as a user. I can understand people abandoning a purchase at that point.
    - dcaldwell 14y ago
      In my experience with a nonprofit, on whose board I serve, this is exactly the case with PayPal. Even if you're very upfront before you send people to PayPal that yes, they can pay with a credit card, once they arrive at PayPal they get confused. I've even had PayPal show me a popup ad for a PayPal branded Mastercard when I was trying to checkout somewhere. Their UI isn't "branded" like the site that the customer was just on so that's confusing in and of itself. In addition, paying with credit card on a PayPal checkout page isn't the main action - you have to search for it. Combine all of those elements and you get a much lower conversion rate.
maximilianburke 14y ago
Patrick, I'm curious how you have been using Stripe as you are in Japan and it seems they only recently began expanding out of America. Is the business entity behind BCC registered in the US?
- patio11 14y ago
  I signed up with my US address and banking information. "By registering for a Stripe Service Account, you are confirming to be either a legal resident of the United States, a United States citizen or a business entity authorized to conduct business by the state in which it operates." (Though I finally got a DBA from Illinois, um, yesterday. Not related to Stripe -- a hospital wasn't thrilled with the notion of writing a particular flavor of check to a natural person.)
  - csomar 14y ago
    Could you elaborate more on this? What's a US address, and how did you get a bank account?
    - patio11 14y ago
      So let me answer the question behind the question first, which I take to be "I don't live in the US, but would like a US bank account": http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/08/15/banking-for-the-uisv/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/08/15/banking-for-the-uisv/ Now to answer the question you asked: I have lived in Japan for my entire adult life, but prior to that I grew up in the United States. I routinely use my former address, which my parents still live at, for business purposes. Even if it weren't trivial for me to open accounts online, I would still have accounts in good standing from e.g. my college student days, which are sufficient to bootstrap me into a customer relationship at any US bank.
jacobn 14y ago
> "All three of these tests were null results. (i.e. No significant difference in aggregate purchases between either of the two options" (for goog&payp vs stripe, and several other combos) This is a very interesting result. I would have thought that additional payment options would boost sales on the margin i.e. increase conversion by a couple of percent (not percentage points ;) for e.g. international customers, or people who already have accounts with GG/PP. Patrick: Any chance you could elaborate a little more here? Would be very interesting to see some more detailed stats on this aspect.
- patio11 14y ago
  Thanks for asking. So it turns out that two of them weren't null results, they were results against the change significant at 90% confidence. (Important difference for A/B testing practitioners, of only mild interest in context of the post.) I updated the post with the correction. If you really like stats, well, here you go: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results Rollover any conversion rate for raw stats. "Offer Credit Cards As Sole Checkout Option" tested Stripe vs. the three checkout methods. "Purchasing Page To Send People To"'s "Classic" is http://www.bingocardcreator.com/purchasing.htm http://www.bingocardcreator.com/purchasing.htm, "Cc Checkout" was the hacky Boostrap CC form. (Not currently available online.) "Offer Credit Cards As Checkout Option" was GC/PP/Stripe vs. GC/PP.
aresant 14y ago
At ConversionVoodoo we've found that the gains pulled out of cart-work are staggering vs. other areas in your funnel - 50%+ improvements to be had even on high volume / "well optimized" projects (10k+ sales/mo). Three easy places to start: a) Simplify the UI - Make it as simple as possible for people to enter their payment details - large fonts, cross-browser tested, minimal pages, optimized for the lowest screen resolution of your average user on up. b) Reiterate TRUST messaging - testimonials or buying popular symbols (Verign /McAfee / etc) and even dialing in the PLACEMENT of those logos is high-value eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-of-trust-logos-can-make-a-huge-difference-in-conversion-rate/ http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen... e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, calling dropped carts, or hitting a pop-up of live help or similar is easy money. Add to this all the usual - proper messaging on buttons, lightning fast response times, mobile optimized version too, etc and you instantly gain a massive advantage over your competitors.
- paraschopra 14y ago
  We have got numerous case studies on the checkout page http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php Some of the common tactics that have worked for our customers: - Providing a summary of what they have ordered and making sure there are no hidden surprises (extra taxes or shipping charges) - Adding trust indicators like Verisign seal (yes, they really work!) - Not requiring them to create an account just to checkout - Adding phone number and physical address that customers can reach out in case they need help - Good looking design (people subconsciously associate good design with higher trust. If you have an odd color, or a grammatical mistake, or a dangling element, it tells how careless you are at designing the most critical page, so you would be careless with their money as well)
- akldfgj 14y ago
  Wow, I am not a target customer for modern e-commerce. I would never return to a store that had behaviors like this: > e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, Training users to haggle at checkout and not trust the list prices > calling dropped carts. harassing people offline after they leave your store? > or hitting a pop-up of live help Does anyone believe in live help? All I ever see it do it block content I am trying to read, providing the equivalent of menu-driven CLI (the scripts agents follow) when I already have a powerful GUI in front of me.
maayank 14y ago
"Is Stripe available outside of the US?" "Currently Stripe is US only..."
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
...I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines... This is going on my "best of" list of HN-related excerpts
- zaptheimpaler 14y ago
  My feelings exactly. That line literally made me feel warm inside for a second. I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines, but this is clearly somebody who understands me and what I need in life
angryasian 14y ago
could it just be his audience, I'm incredibly against adding my credit card on any site.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  You are different from most of users buying on Internet. Most prefer entering credit card directly.
  - angryasian 14y ago
    i find that really hard to believe in this day and age of cyber criminal and so much activity in terms of stolen identities.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      Try to run your own web sites that has these options. On my web site PostJobFree.com there are 3 payment options: Direct (backed by Stripe), PayPal, and Google Checkout. Stripe covers ~85% of new transactions. Paypal ~10%. Google Checkout ~5%.
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      Credit card fraud doesn't really affect the end user, except in time lost disputing fraudulent charged. Mostly the cost of fraud is born by the retailer who receives no money even though they have already shipped the goods. That said, in 13 years of credit card use, I have been defrauded 0 times.
      - angryasian 14y ago
        its still a huge pain in the a$$ , cancelling credit cards, changing any account associated with credit card, waiting for new one in mail, etc. Just the avoiding the potential headaches, is enough reason for me not to enter my credit card in sites. I really can't believe the sentiment of the avg user is that much different from mine
cperciva 14y ago
Stripe.js is a very well-implemented “or something”, where JavaScript that they’ll provide for you hooks into your credit card form with trivial work. (About ~6 lines for me.) If, like me, you don't like the idea of loading someone else's javascript into your own domain, the "web page" side of things can also be done by dropping a single <iframe> tag into your HTML.
ashraful 14y ago
@patio11 Thanks a lot for mentioning me in your blog again. I was wondering why there was a spike in my visitor log. I would love to do a redesign for Appointment Reminder if you're interested :)
nickknw 14y ago
"(A customer had — I kid you not — a lightning strike hit her computer during checkout, and as a consequence the JS callback fired 36 times. This resulted in 36 transactions, which Stripe processed without complaint. Oops." I can't believe the good old 'computer was hit by a lightning bolt' wasn't in one of your test cases, Patrick! I mean it's so obvious :P More seriously, that is one of the wildest reasons for a bug I think I've ever heard.
propercoil 14y ago
that's nice but you arn't US based because you live in japan so how did stripe let you in?
bedroomfireflys 14y ago
"I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines, but" - best part!
crazygringo 14y ago
I can't wait to sign up for Stripe, as soon as they accept currencies besides the USD! My bank account is in the states, but I need to be able to charge Europeans in euros, Brazilians in reais, Japanese in yen, etc...

409 points by craigkerstiens 14y ago

"Suffice it to say there is a) a customer group which needs between 8 and 15 cards and b) they really, really like pretty checkouts." I think this is more "people who are on the margin where they MIGHT be interested in paying for more cards can be convinced when they hit the pretty checkout page". If you don't need more than 15 cards, you probably don't have a burning need for the paid version.

bazookaBen 14y ago

have to admit, that one of the reasons patio11 got Patrick (cofounder of Stripe) to help with customer support is because he's *the patio11 but great customer service is still great, no matter what.

naz 14y ago
Patrick is in the support rotation like most of us at Stripe. He'll answer your email too if you send it on the right day.
- sachinag 14y ago
  I would be very interested in how do you do ticket handoffs/tracking across multiple non-dedicated support people in your rotation.
- bazookaBen 14y ago
  thanks for the clarification
deleted 14y ago
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brown9-2 14y ago
How do you know this for a fact?
- pg_bot 14y ago
  (More anecdotal evidence) Patrick Collison also helped me out when I was implementing Stripe on my site, and I am just a regular joe.

sulife 14y ago

Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.

StavrosK 14y ago
Doesn't that cost way, way too much as a one-off fee? I'd rather pay a small percentage more on each sale, as I don't have that many sales. Also, getting a merchant account appears to be too much of a hassle.
- sulife 14y ago
  Uhhh, what do you mean? Go through Chase paymentech is like 1.9% or so for card not present.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    I mean to set up. Also, I'm not in the US, does that work in the UK?
    - sulife 14y ago
      No clue about UK
dave_sullivan 14y ago
That's certainly not been my experience with setting up online billing through authorize.net (or braintree for that matter). Integration is easy enough, it's the screwing around with getting a merchant account that's a pita. Plus, if you're a startup, you don't really know how much you're going to be selling (or not selling). It's a good idea to keep associated costs variable until you have some better benchmarks. Stripe is unquestionably the fastest, easiest way to be able to accept credit card payments online without making yourself look like an amateur by having google checkout or the like. Not having to go through the process of getting a merchant account--and the way their fees are structured--has been a huge time and sanity saver for me, both for myself and for projects I've worked on.

TomGullen 14y ago

> This means that their credit card details never hit your server. One thing I've been seeing recently is that some implementations using Stripe DO have the CC details hitting their server. The most common case being when Javascript is disabled the form posts to the website because the developer didn't design with graceful degradation, a dangerous mistake when mixed with credit card numbers. It doesn't appear to be a problem for you (your payment page for CC info doesn't gracefully degrade with JS disabled and is impassible - you might want to fix that!) but I've seen it on other sites, and it's especially a problem when other sites don't use SSL as a fail safe for this sort of case which I have also seen. For Stripe it might perhaps be worth considering denying all payments from non HTTPS pages for this reason. It forces the merchants to have an SSL failsafe. Also with CC info being entered on your site, it's presumably trivial for the site itself to record the CC numbers. Trust is the issue here, I'm not going to be entering my CC number on a site I've never heard of, with no reputation. Stripe doesn't solve this issue, Paypal does. Stripe looks wonderful, but it's not going to be suitable for everyone.

MBCook 14y ago
I worked on something with credit card processing a few years ago. As I remember, it doesn't really matter if the details hit your server, but the point is you absolutely can not save them. No putting them in a DB, no putting the in a log file (not even the last four or something like that), nothing. So if your form takes the numbers in, you make an API call, and then you blank them in memory you were OK. If you put them in the user's session, you were in trouble. It's all insanely complicated, and the only good solution is "don't do it." There's a good reason people use things like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net's CIM (where they store it and certify that they are PCI compliant).
- saikat 14y ago
  To make sure there isn't confusion here, having card details go through your server, even if you aren't saving them, still can lead to certain PCI compliance burdens (e.g. you may need to get an audit from a PCI auditor verifying this). Having the card never go to your server is the best way to make sure you are PCI compliant, as you mention.

lrem 14y ago

Just curious: are there any good options outside the US?

TomGullen 14y ago
Basically, no. (I'm in the UK and am poised to jump to Stripe as soon as it becomes available).
- alexmunroe 14y ago
  There is the option of GoCardless (https://gocardless.com/ https://gocardless.com/) in the UK, however they use the Direct Debit system rather than card processing which does somewhat limit you geographically.
  - jusben1369 14y ago
    Aren't they really the "Anti-Stripe" more akin to Dwolla? Banish Credit Cards altogether? Also, I heard there were changes in European direct deposit/ACH laws (the approach Gocardless takes) that will allow them to be European, not just UK, very soon.
vampirechicken 14y ago
2checkout is an option for payments outside the US. They are a bit pricey, but they're one of the few international payment processors around, and have very good customer support, both for buyers and sellers. [I used to work for 2co. I don't any more.]
jusben1369 14y ago
At Spreedly Core we see a lot of European and Asia Pacific customers sign up due to our API and flexibility to change gateways. However, no one outside of Stripe (and so far Stripe is the only one in the US) who has nailed the instant sign up piece.
philoye 14y ago
In Australia, Pin (https://pin.net.au https://pin.net.au) is very similar service: no merchant account required, nice API.

StavrosK 14y ago

God I hate posts about Stripe with a passion. It's like saying "You've had this pain in your back for the last five years? Well, I've got this miracle pill here that will not only make it go away, but it will also taste great. Oh, you're not in the US? Too bad then." Stop reminding me I can't use Stripe all the time.

dmix 14y ago
Stripe is beta testing internationally. I got an account in Canada about 2 weeks ago. http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-expansion-2012-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-square-international-e...
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Fantastic, how do I go about applying, do you know?
  - dmix 14y ago
    https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Done, thank you.
- corkill 14y ago
  Great to hear, I'm just praying they remove the need for a social security number in the US. One of the main reasons we chose the US to incorporate in was for access to business tools like this. But with neither founder having a SS number we can't use the service.
  - davidcuddeback 14y ago
    If you're signing up as a business, can't you provide an EIN instead of a SSN? I see the box for it in their account settings page, but since I'm using it as an individual, I haven't been able to test whether that works without an SSN.

MarkMc 14y ago

In case anyone is curious, here's Patrick's sales graph: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month You can see the big jump in May-July (although the jump for July is 32%, not 53%)

patio11 14y ago
Oopsie. Thanks for the correction.
- brador 14y ago
  Patrick, just noticed your Adwords spend went from $1000's to $0 suddenly. Looks like a disaster. What happened? Is Adwords no longer viable?
  - patio11 14y ago
    I got married. Lots of balls to juggle. "Send credit card statements to VA for entry into the bookkeeping software which automatically populates a few stats on the BCC website" wasn't very high on the list. My actual spend is probably as high as ever, but "Log into AdWords to check" also hasn't been high on the list.
    - akldfgj 14y ago
      VA?
      - ovi256 14y ago
        Virtual assistant. Cheap off-shore outsourcing via the internet, a staple of lean startup.

jeremymcanally 14y ago

Stripe the service is fantastic. I just hope they can get the financial side together soon. They sent me a 1099 on April 14 this year (you know, one day before taxes are due). Fortunately I hadn't filed yet (I was literally typing everything in TurboTax as the postman came). Not only was that usually illegal (at least for traditional 1099's; I don't know if the same rules apply to 1099-K's...haven't looked), it was highly annoying as it was also the second one they sent me (each with a different amount). Turns out they'd switched payment processors or something at one point and didn't bother to tell their customers to expect two 1099's. Still using it. Great product. But I had to file an extension and crap to get it all sorted out, which was highly annoying.

pc 14y ago
Yeah, we just messed this up. I'm very sorry. I'm literally walking to a meeting with a user, but I'll follow up and edit this comment with details and what we're doing to prevent it within the next three hours. [Update:] So, the background here is that 1099 reporting rules changed last year. A lot of companies—including some of our partners—didn't yet have their infrastructure in place to properly handle them. A lot has been written about the change in the law (search "2011 1099 confusion" for a small sample), and there's been a fair amount of ambiguity and confusion overall (Citibank issued 1099s for frequent flyer miles; whether this was necessary isn't yet clear). Due to this confusion, the IRS actually backed off plans to require the reconciliation of Form 1099K in tax returns filed for 2011. In Stripe's case, one of our banking partners responsible for the filings was unable to meet the original filing date for all 1099s. While they filed a proper extension with the IRS, this meant that receipt of your 1099 was delayed. As you point out, we should have done a much better job communicating this at each step -- and, obviously, receiving tax forms in mid-April is not an acceptable outcome regardless. We are working on controlling the process much more closely ourselves next year so that this does not happen again. But the bottom line is: sorry. We built Stripe to make this kind of hassle go away, and we're doing everything we can to make sure that this was a one-off blip.
dennisgorelik 14y ago
Do payment processors even have to send you 1099? If I'm not mistaken, Google Checkout and PayPal did not send me 1099 - I just had to report all the revenue received from them myself.

Irishsteve 14y ago

Stripe is a great service, but I get the feeling their PR company or marketing department promotes extensively here (Makes sense since its the target audience).

patio11 14y ago
Dang, sinister plan revealed: I am in fact a sleeper agent sent back from 2016 to 2006 with the instructions to build the most unlikely business possible, gather 75k karma, and then pave the way for my shadowy masters to get on HN. Seriously: they're on my blog because of the reasons in the post. My blog's on HN because, well, that's a complicated topic but suffice it to say that it happens with a fair degree of regularity.
saikat 14y ago
For what it's worth, we don't have a PR company or marketing department currently =). We try not to post on HN unless we actually think people on HN will like the content (and we've argued internally before and decided not to post stuff to HN because it didn't seem useful enough).
- Irishsteve 14y ago
  Eh, I wasn't meant to be so cynical (It just came across that way because I suppose I am!)

stevoski 14y ago

I currently use FastSpring to handle purchases of my software. What's the advantage to using Stripe instead of FastSpring?

corkill 14y ago
Depending on your volume a lot of cash. Fast Spring is 5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order. Stripe 2.9% + 30 cents.
- sulife 14y ago
  Chase Paymentech - ~1.9% + $0.15 <---- WINNER!
  - davidandgoliath 14y ago
    Stripe would end up costing an additional $20,000 a year or thereabouts for us. Due to their instant sign-up and almost instant approval however, they were the only option for a quickfix while we await chase or braintree to approve our applications. :) Love their UI & easy integration though.
    - sulife 14y ago
      Chase usually takes me < 24 hrs for VAR sheet...
metadata 14y ago
Stripe allows you to charge customer on your site instead of redirecting her to other domain to fill out the purchase form. So, you lose track of your website visitor in a very important moment. If purchase never occurs, you have no idea why. On the other hand, with Stripe you have full control of complete purchasing experience, can experiment with various designs and flows - and measure everything. That enables huge gains with rigorous A/B testing, as Patrick explained.
fastspring 14y ago
Dan, FastSpring’s CEO, here. That’s a good question. With FastSpring, you don’t lose track of your site visitors because we support cross-domain tracking. When a purchase doesn’t complete, you can see the order issues and resolve them as appropriate. You can experiment with various designs and flows because FastSpring order pages are highly flexible and customizable in terms of how the order flow can look, placement of various elements on the order page, etc. and A/B testing is supported. FastSpring all-inclusive, turnkey functionality is mainly UI based. Little coding is needed, it’s all there – functionality you need to launch and functionality you need to grow and maximize the business and its revenue. FastSpring pricing of its all-inclusive service includes the higher processing costs inherent in international transactions, Amex transactions, and certain alternative payment methods. Here are some advantages to FastSpring: FastSpring works with developers and companies located anywhere US companies are authorized to do business, handles global tax compliance and tax payment management including for VAT, enables end users to pay using their localized currency to avoid bank/exchange fees and a poor US/USD-centric user experience, provides an order page localized in 20+ languages, has PayPal integrated, lets you skip the PCI Assessment Questionnaire, offers fraud prevention, a built-in shopping cart, Google Analytics and marketing ad campaign tracking integration, an unlimited number of easy to setup post-order notifications, designs an order page to match the look and feel of the other pages of the developer’s website, offers merchandising features for cross and upselling to maximize the average order size and optimizer order conversion, built-in notifications, a future bill testing GUI, pre-bill notifications for annual subscriptions, reseller and affiliate management, user role mgmt. & change tracking, consulting for SEO/PPC/Affiliate marketing/Online marketing/order page optimization, one-time purchases in addition to recurring billing, among other advantages. Hope that's helpful with your comparison.

paranoiacblack 14y ago

I've never heard of this service before but it looks quite interesting. I wonder though, how feasible is something like this for paying membership dues in a small club, for example? Is there some other service does this a lot better?

paulbaumgart 14y ago
WePay makes that particular use-case very convenient IME.

deleted 14y ago

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dcaldwell 14y ago

I work in the same co-working facility as an education-based startup that switched from using PayPal(where user gets redirected to PayPal) to Stripe (completely branded checkout) and their conversion rates increased 40% overnight and have stayed at those levels. After digging into their API, we're actually building our new company, MoonClerk, on top of Stripe's API. We'll basically be an abstraction layer on top of Stripe so that non-developers can use it and implement it on their site, with a focus on recurring payments (even though we do one-time payments). We really want to allow non-developers the ability to use Stripe.

FooBarWidget 14y ago
How is this possible? Through Paypal customers can also pay with credit cards, and even more. They can use checks, or bank transfers (very important in Europe where credit cards are not as popular), etc. Why would usage of Paypal decrease conversion compared to pure credit cards? My guess is that a lot of customers don't know what Paypal is and don't realize they can just use their credit card.
- joeblubaugh 14y ago
  And the PayPal flow is godawful - direct to a new page, get prompted to: 1. Log in. 2. Create Account. 3. Enter payment deets. (Small text near bottom of page, not always available, depending on the merchant). Even if you have an account, they don't consistently keep my default payment method - often switching back to my bank account even when I've made a CC my default. This all adds up to a level of friction that I hate, hate, hate, hate as a user. I can understand people abandoning a purchase at that point.
  - dcaldwell 14y ago
    In my experience with a nonprofit, on whose board I serve, this is exactly the case with PayPal. Even if you're very upfront before you send people to PayPal that yes, they can pay with a credit card, once they arrive at PayPal they get confused. I've even had PayPal show me a popup ad for a PayPal branded Mastercard when I was trying to checkout somewhere. Their UI isn't "branded" like the site that the customer was just on so that's confusing in and of itself. In addition, paying with credit card on a PayPal checkout page isn't the main action - you have to search for it. Combine all of those elements and you get a much lower conversion rate.

maximilianburke 14y ago

Patrick, I'm curious how you have been using Stripe as you are in Japan and it seems they only recently began expanding out of America. Is the business entity behind BCC registered in the US?

patio11 14y ago
I signed up with my US address and banking information. "By registering for a Stripe Service Account, you are confirming to be either a legal resident of the United States, a United States citizen or a business entity authorized to conduct business by the state in which it operates." (Though I finally got a DBA from Illinois, um, yesterday. Not related to Stripe -- a hospital wasn't thrilled with the notion of writing a particular flavor of check to a natural person.)
- csomar 14y ago
  Could you elaborate more on this? What's a US address, and how did you get a bank account?
  - patio11 14y ago
    So let me answer the question behind the question first, which I take to be "I don't live in the US, but would like a US bank account": http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/08/15/banking-for-the-uisv/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/08/15/banking-for-the-uisv/ Now to answer the question you asked: I have lived in Japan for my entire adult life, but prior to that I grew up in the United States. I routinely use my former address, which my parents still live at, for business purposes. Even if it weren't trivial for me to open accounts online, I would still have accounts in good standing from e.g. my college student days, which are sufficient to bootstrap me into a customer relationship at any US bank.

jacobn 14y ago

> "All three of these tests were null results. (i.e. No significant difference in aggregate purchases between either of the two options" (for goog&payp vs stripe, and several other combos) This is a very interesting result. I would have thought that additional payment options would boost sales on the margin i.e. increase conversion by a couple of percent (not percentage points ;) for e.g. international customers, or people who already have accounts with GG/PP. Patrick: Any chance you could elaborate a little more here? Would be very interesting to see some more detailed stats on this aspect.

patio11 14y ago
Thanks for asking. So it turns out that two of them weren't null results, they were results against the change significant at 90% confidence. (Important difference for A/B testing practitioners, of only mild interest in context of the post.) I updated the post with the correction. If you really like stats, well, here you go: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results Rollover any conversion rate for raw stats. "Offer Credit Cards As Sole Checkout Option" tested Stripe vs. the three checkout methods. "Purchasing Page To Send People To"'s "Classic" is http://www.bingocardcreator.com/purchasing.htm http://www.bingocardcreator.com/purchasing.htm, "Cc Checkout" was the hacky Boostrap CC form. (Not currently available online.) "Offer Credit Cards As Checkout Option" was GC/PP/Stripe vs. GC/PP.

aresant 14y ago

At ConversionVoodoo we've found that the gains pulled out of cart-work are staggering vs. other areas in your funnel - 50%+ improvements to be had even on high volume / "well optimized" projects (10k+ sales/mo). Three easy places to start: a) Simplify the UI - Make it as simple as possible for people to enter their payment details - large fonts, cross-browser tested, minimal pages, optimized for the lowest screen resolution of your average user on up. b) Reiterate TRUST messaging - testimonials or buying popular symbols (Verign /McAfee / etc) and even dialing in the PLACEMENT of those logos is high-value eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-of-trust-logos-can-make-a-huge-difference-in-conversion-rate/ http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen... e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, calling dropped carts, or hitting a pop-up of live help or similar is easy money. Add to this all the usual - proper messaging on buttons, lightning fast response times, mobile optimized version too, etc and you instantly gain a massive advantage over your competitors.

paraschopra 14y ago
We have got numerous case studies on the checkout page http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php Some of the common tactics that have worked for our customers: - Providing a summary of what they have ordered and making sure there are no hidden surprises (extra taxes or shipping charges) - Adding trust indicators like Verisign seal (yes, they really work!) - Not requiring them to create an account just to checkout - Adding phone number and physical address that customers can reach out in case they need help - Good looking design (people subconsciously associate good design with higher trust. If you have an odd color, or a grammatical mistake, or a dangling element, it tells how careless you are at designing the most critical page, so you would be careless with their money as well)
akldfgj 14y ago
Wow, I am not a target customer for modern e-commerce. I would never return to a store that had behaviors like this: > e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, Training users to haggle at checkout and not trust the list prices > calling dropped carts. harassing people offline after they leave your store? > or hitting a pop-up of live help Does anyone believe in live help? All I ever see it do it block content I am trying to read, providing the equivalent of menu-driven CLI (the scripts agents follow) when I already have a powerful GUI in front of me.

maayank 14y ago

"Is Stripe available outside of the US?" "Currently Stripe is US only..."

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

...I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines... This is going on my "best of" list of HN-related excerpts

zaptheimpaler 14y ago
My feelings exactly. That line literally made me feel warm inside for a second. I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines, but this is clearly somebody who understands me and what I need in life

angryasian 14y ago

could it just be his audience, I'm incredibly against adding my credit card on any site.

dennisgorelik 14y ago
You are different from most of users buying on Internet. Most prefer entering credit card directly.
- angryasian 14y ago
  i find that really hard to believe in this day and age of cyber criminal and so much activity in terms of stolen identities.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Try to run your own web sites that has these options. On my web site PostJobFree.com there are 3 payment options: Direct (backed by Stripe), PayPal, and Google Checkout. Stripe covers ~85% of new transactions. Paypal ~10%. Google Checkout ~5%.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Credit card fraud doesn't really affect the end user, except in time lost disputing fraudulent charged. Mostly the cost of fraud is born by the retailer who receives no money even though they have already shipped the goods. That said, in 13 years of credit card use, I have been defrauded 0 times.
    - angryasian 14y ago
      its still a huge pain in the a$$ , cancelling credit cards, changing any account associated with credit card, waiting for new one in mail, etc. Just the avoiding the potential headaches, is enough reason for me not to enter my credit card in sites. I really can't believe the sentiment of the avg user is that much different from mine

cperciva 14y ago

Stripe.js is a very well-implemented “or something”, where JavaScript that they’ll provide for you hooks into your credit card form with trivial work. (About ~6 lines for me.) If, like me, you don't like the idea of loading someone else's javascript into your own domain, the "web page" side of things can also be done by dropping a single <iframe> tag into your HTML.

ashraful 14y ago

@patio11 Thanks a lot for mentioning me in your blog again. I was wondering why there was a spike in my visitor log. I would love to do a redesign for Appointment Reminder if you're interested :)

nickknw 14y ago

"(A customer had — I kid you not — a lightning strike hit her computer during checkout, and as a consequence the JS callback fired 36 times. This resulted in 36 transactions, which Stripe processed without complaint. Oops." I can't believe the good old 'computer was hit by a lightning bolt' wasn't in one of your test cases, Patrick! I mean it's so obvious :P More seriously, that is one of the wildest reasons for a bug I think I've ever heard.

propercoil 14y ago

that's nice but you arn't US based because you live in japan so how did stripe let you in?

bedroomfireflys 14y ago

"I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines, but" - best part!

crazygringo 14y ago

I can't wait to sign up for Stripe, as soon as they accept currencies besides the USD! My bank account is in the states, but I need to be able to charge Europeans in euros, Brazilians in reais, Japanese in yen, etc...