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Let people pay you. Make it easy
- alpb 13y agoI appreciate this effort. But isn't integrating Stripe fairly easy with Stripe Connect button (https://stripe.com/connect https://stripe.com/connect) without any effort on backend, or even integrating any backend code?
- begriffs 13y agoIt seems like Stripe connect requires users to create accounts. I wanted to make the minimal app possible to pay me. No accounts, no nothing, just payment. That said, there's not much to my app. Just some rails routes, a form, and Stripe Checkout on the client side. But it gets the job done.
- StavrosK 13y agoYeah, sounds like he meant Stripe Checkout, which is half of the same thing you do (it returns a token, which you then need to charge), but has a better UI.
- yogo 13y agoIt sounds like Stripe Checkout is what's needed here. Maybe that's what was meant.
- thatthatis 13y agoThe short answer is: No. Connect is for marketplaces and does some amazing things to make 3 party payments substantially less painful. Checkout is for 2 party payments and does some amazing things to make getting credit cards and storing them in a secure vault substantially less painful. However, neither solution is drop-in zero-code. Stripe focuses on removing friction at the hard parts of the problem so you can build machines that do payments, Paypal focuses on payments that require no effort on the backend.
- rurounijones 13y agoHeh, that is very easy. I like it BUT it is SO simple and ad-hoc that I wonder if people would be put off by it. Like the story about users who disbelieve a big system has done something unless it takes a few seconds to process etc. I wonder if people will think "This is too easy; it must be a scam"
- marcamillion 13y agoThis is nice. I like it. Thanks!
- dangrossman 13y agoIt seems like a PayPal button would solve the same problem a whole lot easier.
- lowboy 13y agoBut then you risk becoming another horror story of Paypal if things go wrong.
- dangrossman 13y agoStatistically, things do not often go wrong with PayPal. The number of "horror stories" is extremely low for a payment service with hundreds of millions of accounts and $145 billion in payment volume. Regardless, the idea here is to be quick and dirty to accept occasional payments. There's no risk there since you can immediately withdraw the payment. If your account gets closed, who cares. You don't need a Stripe account, a Heroku app, and devops knowledge when copying and pasting a PayPal button or telling someone to send money to your e-mail would suffice.
- kamaal 13y agoIn my last company a VP once told us, when you do a good job- customers don't feel a need to tell you about it. They just assume things are going right and let it run that way. But when you do something wrong they generally want to make it clear. That is what is happening with PayPal here. No one feels the need to write something good about them when everything is going right(Even if that is happening all the time). One genuinely dissatisfied customer can bring you a lot of bad name(Even if sometimes that is purely an exception).
- ed209 13y agoThe PayPal horror stories are just the problems that people shout about and that go viral. In fact the problems with PayPal are much more wide spread. I'd say that PayPal got lazy because no one has challenged them. As a result they still have an underinvested product that is painful to use. I've used paypal as a merchant/developer on many products and on my latest project I actually decided not to bother charging customers until Stripe arrived in the UK (which it now has). It's not that people don't feel the need to write something good about PayPal, it's that there's very little good to write about PayPal. (not to detract from what PayPal originally did, which was monumental at the time, but they rested on their laurels)
- magicarp 13y agoDoes this need the overhead of being a fully-fledged Rails application? What about making it a Sinatra app?
- jackowayed 13y agoThe demo app is not served over HTTPS, nor do the instructions tell users to use HTTPS. This is bad. Yes, in its normal (unattacked) operation, the connection to Stripe will be safe HTTPS. But if someone does a man-in-the-middle attack, then there will be no connection to Stripe, just a connection to an evil website that steals the card (or both to be sneakier; it doesn't matter). If you're not serving your site over HTTPS, then an attacker can arbitrarily rewrite the content of your site, so no one can trust it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- krichman 13y agoThis is a fantastic point. Someone should make a pull request so that the app requires some CERTIFICATE_PATH variable set and won't work without it. HTTPS or equal security is absolutely required for anything to do with online payments.
- heelhook 13y agoIt is, although Stripe does only use https. When you post that form stripe.js captures the form submission and submits to its server, returning instead some tokens to identify the charge, so what is submitted through http is actually just a mostly worthless token (assuming that the credentials for the app are secure). I'm not disagreeing with you, but the site running on https only is important in the context of the user not being thrown away by the lack of https, sensitive information is only transmitted through https.
- smilliken 13y agoThere's more to it than that, re-read jackowayed's comment. Man-in-the-middle attacks are a real threat that should be considered.
- aaronblohowiak 13y agoYou don't know (as a normal user) that the submission is going to go to Stripe with any high degree of certainty. Someone MITMs the plain http form and changes it to direct the cc info to a malicious server.
- DelvarWorld 13y agoLucre is almost as poorly thought up a name as postgresql. seriously, developers should never be allowed to name things that real humans will see.
- davidbanham 13y agoThis looks cool, but probably worth pointing out that it's only relevant to Americans or Canadians as it relies on Stripe.
- rurounijones 13y agoAnd UKians soon http://thenextweb.com/uk/2013/03/01/stripe-uk-europe-launch/ http://thenextweb.com/uk/2013/03/01/stripe-uk-europe-launch/
- StavrosK 13y agoSome UKans now, I'm in the beta and it's amazing. I use it for early beta access here: http://beta.getinstabot.com/ http://beta.getinstabot.com/ Couldn't be easier to work with. Major, major props to the Stripe team.
- Yaggo 13y agoIt sucks so much that we don't have a global, nation-independent payment system. Oh wait.
- benatkin 13y agoCasual use doesn't fit well into most tech company's business models. Their APIs made to work for casual use because they don't get used casually enough to make the support costs of casual use outweigh the marketing gain for serious customers. If this was turned into a WordPress plugin that caught on and tens of thousands of people installed it on their blogs for casual use, I think Stripe would probably make it more difficult to sign up.
- Kiro 13y agoIs it even legal to accept money like this as a non-business entity? What about taxes?
- apineda 13y agoTo be punished for looking after oneself huh.. Well, we have to grow up someday. edit: to by slightly more productive, I'm unsure of any potential legal issues regarding this.
- bdonlan 13y agoIt's income, just like any other income, and is subject to income tax in the US. If you're paid more than $20,000 and had more than 200 transactions, you'll get a 1099-K, but even if you don't, you still have to report it as income on your 1040s. Also, see these entries in Stripe's FAQ - you're not required to be a business to use stripe: https://support.stripe.com/questions/sole-proprietor-without-federal-ein https://support.stripe.com/questions/sole-proprietor-without... https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-crowdfunding-sites-need-to-be-in-the-united-states https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-crowdfunding-sites-n... AIUI, incorporation is mostly about limiting liability, and making it easier to sell off the business (or shares thereof) later. There are probably other advantages as well, but making it legal to accept payments at all isn't one of them.
- alexwright 13y agoIs it even legal for two people to voluntarily transact using currency? Man, that's some pretty scary thinking...
- namuol 13y agoThis is nice, but what we really need is something that generates non-ugly "buy" form templates that work with Paypal, Amazon, Google Wallet, and Stripe for direct CC purchases.
- evadne 13y agohttps://spacebox.io/ https://spacebox.io/
- r0s 13y ago> All plans are subject to Stripe's additional transaction charge of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. They should just put that center at the top of the site so I can bounce faster.
- 6ren 13y agoAnnoyance: you start reading, and the page suddenly scrolls back to the top. That is, the page has mostly loaded. You scroll down, and start to read. The rest of the page loads, and it scrolls back up to the top. (I'm assuming the page codes this, and it isn't a behaviour of FF 20.) So many sites do this, and it is so annoying. Probably, on github's own servers, loading is so fast that they never experience this problem themselves.
- bowerbird 13y agoyou da man, joe! thanks! the check's in the mail. ;+) -bowerbird
- winter_blue 13y agoStripe is currently not supported in my country. PayPal is pretty much the only payment gateway supported. Is there something like this, but for PayPal?
- addandsubtract 13y agoPayPal, outside of the US, requires you to pay over their site. So no, there isn't something exactly like this for PayPal. You could, however, just embed a PayPal button in your checkout and have the buyer complete the order and pay on PayPal.
- mikelbring 13y agohttps://coinfly.com https://coinfly.com does the same thing, easy way to send invoices with Stripe.
- axelf 13y agoBut then you have to pay stripe's transaction fee. Why not use something like venmo that is free when you use it with ACH?
- j_s 13y agoCan you share any experience you've had implementing w/ Venmo, especially in comparison to this Stripe implementation?