10 ms·

MasterCard's Simplify Commerce

176 points by sachinag 13y ago

sachinag 13y ago
Complete competitor to Stripe and Balanced and Braintree.js. Just a teeny bit underneath pricing for all - 2.85% versus 2.90%.
- rsync 13y ago
  ... which is a fairly terrible percentage rate. Even a small processor should be able to get under 2%, provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks. There's a tremendous amount of froth in those rates.
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    You can do better than 2.9% for sure but I'm not sure about under 2% for a small merchant in CNP.
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    2% is below CNP interchange on a lot of card types. For example, it costs the processor 2.95% to charge a Platinum MasterCard or 2.05% to charge a World MasterCard card as CNP. A processor charging less than interchange is taking a loss; it's paying the merchant more than it'll get funded by charging that card. The flat-rate pricing these new aggregators offer at 2.7-2.9% already builds in taking a loss on some cards by making it up on ones with cheaper interchange rates. To go below 2% flat rate and make a profit is near impossible. The only place you'll find that is somewhere like PayPal, with $100k/mo or more in volume and a negotiated contract, and they can get away with 1.9% because many of their payments are balance-funded or ACH-funded at nearly no cost. 2.2-2.5% is much more realistic and you'll still need a minimum monthly volume to get it. Or we can all set up retail stores and abandon this e-commerce stuff. Rates are much lower when you can swipe a physical card. The real profit-taking is happening in those card readers you can pick up at Staples/BestBuy/etc from Square/PayPal/Intuit/GoCardless where they're collecting 2.7-2.9% and paying half that in interchange.
    - No1 13y ago
      You would think that MasterCard could charge significantly lower fees on MasterCard transactions since they're, like, MasterCard and all... Clearly, they're not interested in competing based upon price.
  - mbesto 13y ago
    provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks. A large chunk of the costs associated with taking payments is fraud. (see founders at work - Paypal[1]) So assuming you don't have a lot of fraud is wishful thinking at best. [1] - http://jesse.la/lessons-from-founders-at-work-stories-of-startups-early-days/ http://jesse.la/lessons-from-founders-at-work-stories-of-sta...
- irollboozers 13y ago
  You'd think someone like Mastercard could actually provide a significant enough percentage difference to matter. 2.85% is still way too high.
mehulkar 13y ago
Seems identical to stripe?
levosmetalo 13y ago
US[A ONLY | ELESS].
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kylelibra 13y ago
The entrenched payment companies are definitely scared of competition, but by launching clones of their competitors they show they still don't get it.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  I think that their target audience are (mom & pop) businesses (about to go online) happy to trust the Mastercard brand, not programmers that get uppity about seeing yet another clone & complaining about an API.
eightyone 13y ago
"Deposits are made into your account in two business days in most cases." This is awful copywriting. There's not even an asterisk with more information or anything.
angersock 13y ago
Jesus, this looks kind of like a desperate in-house hackathon product pushed live before the execs could kill it. (Props to the development team! You still need better docs though. :( )
- kevinbluer 13y ago
  Couldn't have said it better :)
- jacquesc 13y ago
  This seems a bit cynical. Either Mastercard is changing their organization around from the top, or there happened to be a rogue product team that managed to fight their way through the bureaucracy to launch something cool. Either way, props to em.
  - subsystem 13y ago
    http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-leadership/21657/how-mastercard-restructured-it-innovation http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-leadership/21657/how-maste...
aquark 13y ago
I'd like to see one of these 'API friendly' companies compete more in the physical space to. Basically something equivalent to Square with a Stripe-like API and lower rates for swiped transactions.
NKCSS 13y ago
Can't find anything about chargebacks, wonder if they are free :)
- larkarvin 13y ago
  $12 for charge backs https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173584-how-much-does-it-cost-to-use-simplify-commerce- https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173584-h...
pvnick 13y ago
I wouldn't trust anything that comes from Mastercard or Visa directly. I would much rather have the companies' idiosyncrasies and politics abstracted through a 3rd-party service like stripe or balanced. That's just my kneejerk reaction, take it or leave it.
- CoachRufus87 13y ago
  Why not? Millions trust them with one their most important assets: cash.
  - ericd 13y ago
    On the merchant side, the picture is a lot less friendly than the consumer side. With a traditional merchant account, there is basically a march of monotonically increasing fees here and there that add up, and are only brought back down a bit when someone wins against them in court.
alphamale3000 13y ago
Yes! We'll save 0.05%! That's 500$ for every million in sales. You must have huge sales to justify a switch.
- memset 13y ago
  If you're doing a million in sales, you should negotiate a rate with your CC provider which will be far lower than the list price. All of the providers - Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, and most likely these guys - will negotiate a rate with you, and if you're doing any volume you ought to give them a call and ask. When you call, they will ask you two important things: 1. What is your current volume (if you're looking at switching from someone else) 2. What is your chargeback rate? (How often do angry customers call the credit card company to issue a chargeback against you?) If you are growing and have increasing transaction volume, and you aren't defrauding your customers, then you can absolutely get a lower rate than you're paying now. This is true for so many things in business - the list price means nothing!
greghinch 13y ago
To play diplomat, I see a lot of Stripe loyalty / Mastercard hate already brewing here, and I think that's a bit unwarranted. Stripe has certainly earned their place as a cherished service, but I would venture to bet a lot of devs worked quite hard on Simplify as well, so it'd be nice to see discussion on the merits of the offering rather than preconceived notions of the provider. If nothing else, even if 0.05% isn't much, I'm happy to see if they can start a bit of a pricing war here. If it drives payment costs down across the board, all the better.
- pc 13y ago
  (I built the first version of Stripe and work here.) I think the unfortunate aspect of these clones is that they're lazy. I have huge respect for anyone that innovates in payments -- I know how hard it is, and I'd imagine it's even harder to do that as part of a larger company. What I find disappointing is when a product copies everything about Stripe -- everything from Stripe.js to the "live/test" switch to the "1/2/3" getting started pop-up when you create your account to the nomenclature of "InvoiceItems" to the ordering of tabs in the account settings. It's certainly MasterCard's (and anyone's) prerogative to do that, but I don't think it's particularly worthy of support from other engineers and makers. We should encourage each other any time we see great, original work -- creativity is hard, and new ideas are often delicate in the early days. It'd be really cool if MasterCard did that, but Simplify unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything that's new. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)
  - breck 13y ago
    Two day payouts looks like a great innovation to me. :)
    - pc 13y ago
      To Stripe's discredit, that's not a new idea :-). Don't worry; we'll fix this soon.
      - melvinram 13y ago
jusben1369 13y ago
0.05% is a tiny amount. This is the first shot though across the bow on lowering the transactional rates set by Stripe, Braintree etc.
jusben1369 13y ago
"Sign up and develop. When you're ready to go live, tell us a little about your business." It's actually more of a "PayMill" model than a Stripe model. So they allow you to begin development but they don't actually promise immediate on-boarding.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  Stripe does exactly the same thing. You have to enter some business details like tax ID, sales volume, etc. to go live.
diggan 13y ago
As usual, there is no information at all on which countries that is supported, I guess this is only supported in USA. Maybe I'm the only one outside of America... Edit: Yeah, after registering, confirming my email and trying to apply for a full account, I know that it's only for America. Sigh...
- sleepyhead 13y ago
  "At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business." https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-some-of-my-customers-are-located-outside-of-the-u-s-can-i-still-use-simplify-commerce- https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...
  - diggan 13y ago
    Cool, in Support -> Home -> General, couldn't be more visible. Tried searching for "country" in the support-area, no hits, no more time spent searching.
- jrgnsd 13y ago
  I had to read through the Developer Terms of Use to find that out.
mattparcher 13y ago
Something that caught my eye: the name "Simplify" is pretty close to "Simple", the online bank service. Different products entirely, I realize—but heck, Simple’s twitter handle is even @simplify.
- justinreeves 13y ago
  That was actually what drew me to the headline. I saw "Simplify" and thought it was about my bank.
- eightyone 13y ago
  I made the same connection.
joelrunyon 13y ago
Jumping on this thread for a flyer. Any stripe devs know if it's possible to integrate with infusionsoft.com? That integration would make me so, so happy.
- jkuria 13y ago
  I completely agree. And with 1ShoppingCart too. I considered using stripe but they didn't integrate with any of the popular shopping carts that handle affiliate marketing type of features. So I have to pay for two merchant accounts and a load balancing gateway. I also live in fear of my funds being frozen any moment or losing sales if I go over my processing limit.
rudros 13y ago
Check out https://www.simplify.com// https://www.simplify.com// (the double slash ending is important).
- joshrice 13y ago
  What was there? Just getting a 404...or is that your point?
  - rudros 13y ago
    Ahhh, they shut it down already. It was a page with links to login to their JBOSS admin pages and such. You needed passwords, of course, but still, not the sort of thing you want clients to randomly stumble across.
    - rurounijones 13y ago
      Bloody hell, that is an instant, trust destroying, security cock-up. You can set JBoss to bind to a separate IP address (i.e. one not publicly accessible etc.) for all management functions, it is a simple configuration change.
dutchbrit 13y ago
Do they also accept Maestro debit cards?
- jusben1369 13y ago
  US only.
gesman 13y ago
It is only supported in USA. I'm in Canada. Next please ...
jackbravo 13y ago
If MasterCard can create an international version of this product before Stripe, then this will be big.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kawera 13y ago
At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business Oh well...
- AndyJPartridge 13y ago
  I was going to post the same thing. Hope Stripe get there first, as I'd like to support them over Mastercard.
- sideproject 13y ago
  With clones of Stripe poppin' up everywhere, I think the niche advantage would be to be able to scale the service to a number of other countries where this type of service is either expensive or unavailable (please come to Australia! - I know there is "pin", but we wouldn't mind a cheaper alternative without any monthly fees!)
  - lbarrow 13y ago
    Have you looked at Braintree? We're charging 2.4% and $0.30 in Australia, with no monthly fee.
    - zemaj 13y ago
      We use Braintree, but it's a payment gateway in Australia not a full stack solution. You still need to provide your own merchant and account and deal with the endless hassles that come with it. Merchant accounts are really the hard part of accepting money in Australia at this point.
    - thejosh 13y ago
      Does it work similar to PIN/PayPal where you hold the money then deposit the money into a bank account or do you require a merchant account?
      - lbarrow 13y ago
        We work with you to get you set up with a merchant account. Unfortunately, the application process isn't instant yet like it is in the US.
zt 13y ago
I find this to be a really interesting business decision for MasterCard. MasterCard cannot offer this service directly on their information systems because of there own rules and the antitrust consent decree. So what have they done? They've built a wrapper around Priority Payments Services, an independent sales organization of Wells Fargo. (For reference, Stripe is also an ISO of Wells Fargo Merchant Services). Which is all a long way of saying that MasterCard went pretty far out of there way to build this system. They must really see value in selling directly to merchant developers. There is another possible story here: maybe the ISO wanted to compete with Stripe, they built the system and site, and asked MasterCard for their branding.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Mastercard can see almost exactly how much Stripe is growing, I don't think they needed to be very perceptive in "seeing value in selling directly to merchant developers".
  - zt 13y ago
    Not to be flip, but I haven't found that MasterCard or Visa are particular great at data analysis. Additionally, I would be surprised if MasterCard could easily figure out the information you suggest from the data they get. I could be completely wrong, but I've seen them have enough trouble figuring out interchange charges -- their core business -- let alone random analytic facts about (so-called) competitors. To my immediate recollection ISO 8583 (the standard set out for credit card transactions) doesn't have much info on independent sales organizations (a different ISO acronym). This is all to say that the transactions are through a merchant account set up by Stripe for each particular merchant at Wells Fargo Merchant Services, then through First Data and only then hit MasterCard. Again, I'm not certain, but I'm not sure its a question they can easily answer from their data.
larkarvin 13y ago
This is cool, but much cooler if they will support businesses outside US. it seems i'm stuck with paypal and Payment gateway in the Philippines are way too pricey for our business
tlrobinson 13y ago
BTW MasterCard has a whole bunch of other interesting APIs available: https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API
kephra 13y ago
Its still stupid credit cards. Most eCommerce sites have a profit margin of less then 10%, often around 5%. Charging 2.85% + $0.30 kills most business ideas.
jwilliams 13y ago
Restricted to US individuals and companies only... I'm not sure why sites don't call that out from the get-go.
- sangaya 13y ago
  It is not restricted to US individuals, just US Businesses. "Using Simplify Commerce, you can create payments with credit and debit cards carrying major card brand logos for customers anywhere in the world. At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business." [https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-some-of-my-customers-are-located-outside-of-the-u-s-can-i-still-use-simplify-commerce https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...]
chiph 13y ago
Looks like they don't handle recurring charges for you. So you'll have to be the one to hold onto the card number and jump through the PCI compliance hoops. Or go with a card vault service.
- hmind 13y ago
  Is it not this? https://www.simplify.com/commerce/docs/tutorial/index#recurring-payments https://www.simplify.com/commerce/docs/tutorial/index#recurr...
  - chiph 13y ago
    Whoops. Didn't see that. Thanks.
techboots 13y ago
So what's the consensus on this? I'm looking to integrate either Stripe or Simplify... which service do I go with?
- nwenzel 13y ago
  Stripe knows how to innovate. Simplify knows how to copy. Go with Stripe.
zanny 13y ago
Give me your bitcoin address and we can have a transfer in minutes for a few satoshis or within an hour or so for free. (blahblahblah, usd, ponzie scheme, cbx halting transfers, grandmothers)
csdreamer7 13y ago
Are there any chargeback fees? (For those who don't know a fee in addition to the chargeback which is usually $25.)
- NKCSS 13y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955772
  - csdreamer7 13y ago
    Thankyou!
kiyanforoughi 13y ago
2.85% fees? Such a rip-off.... Braintree is much better/cheaper and offers so much more.
LukeHoersten 13y ago
Their website design looks like a hardware store site design.
rdl 13y ago
Given that they permit weapons and pornography, if they're otherwise just a direct clone of Stripe with the MasterCard brand, they're pretty awesome. I'd be fine if it cost 3.5%, but it's actually cheaper too.

176 points by sachinag 13y ago

Complete competitor to Stripe and Balanced and Braintree.js. Just a teeny bit underneath pricing for all - 2.85% versus 2.90%.

rsync 13y ago
... which is a fairly terrible percentage rate. Even a small processor should be able to get under 2%, provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks. There's a tremendous amount of froth in those rates.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  You can do better than 2.9% for sure but I'm not sure about under 2% for a small merchant in CNP.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  2% is below CNP interchange on a lot of card types. For example, it costs the processor 2.95% to charge a Platinum MasterCard or 2.05% to charge a World MasterCard card as CNP. A processor charging less than interchange is taking a loss; it's paying the merchant more than it'll get funded by charging that card. The flat-rate pricing these new aggregators offer at 2.7-2.9% already builds in taking a loss on some cards by making it up on ones with cheaper interchange rates. To go below 2% flat rate and make a profit is near impossible. The only place you'll find that is somewhere like PayPal, with $100k/mo or more in volume and a negotiated contract, and they can get away with 1.9% because many of their payments are balance-funded or ACH-funded at nearly no cost. 2.2-2.5% is much more realistic and you'll still need a minimum monthly volume to get it. Or we can all set up retail stores and abandon this e-commerce stuff. Rates are much lower when you can swipe a physical card. The real profit-taking is happening in those card readers you can pick up at Staples/BestBuy/etc from Square/PayPal/Intuit/GoCardless where they're collecting 2.7-2.9% and paying half that in interchange.
  - No1 13y ago
    You would think that MasterCard could charge significantly lower fees on MasterCard transactions since they're, like, MasterCard and all... Clearly, they're not interested in competing based upon price.
- mbesto 13y ago
  provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks. A large chunk of the costs associated with taking payments is fraud. (see founders at work - Paypal[1]) So assuming you don't have a lot of fraud is wishful thinking at best. [1] - http://jesse.la/lessons-from-founders-at-work-stories-of-startups-early-days/ http://jesse.la/lessons-from-founders-at-work-stories-of-sta...
irollboozers 13y ago
You'd think someone like Mastercard could actually provide a significant enough percentage difference to matter. 2.85% is still way too high.

mehulkar 13y ago

Seems identical to stripe?

levosmetalo 13y ago

US[A ONLY | ELESS].

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kylelibra 13y ago

The entrenched payment companies are definitely scared of competition, but by launching clones of their competitors they show they still don't get it.

agilebyte 13y ago
I think that their target audience are (mom & pop) businesses (about to go online) happy to trust the Mastercard brand, not programmers that get uppity about seeing yet another clone & complaining about an API.

eightyone 13y ago

"Deposits are made into your account in two business days in most cases." This is awful copywriting. There's not even an asterisk with more information or anything.

angersock 13y ago

Jesus, this looks kind of like a desperate in-house hackathon product pushed live before the execs could kill it. (Props to the development team! You still need better docs though. :( )

kevinbluer 13y ago
Couldn't have said it better :)
jacquesc 13y ago
This seems a bit cynical. Either Mastercard is changing their organization around from the top, or there happened to be a rogue product team that managed to fight their way through the bureaucracy to launch something cool. Either way, props to em.
- subsystem 13y ago
  http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-leadership/21657/how-mastercard-restructured-it-innovation http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-leadership/21657/how-maste...

aquark 13y ago

I'd like to see one of these 'API friendly' companies compete more in the physical space to. Basically something equivalent to Square with a Stripe-like API and lower rates for swiped transactions.

NKCSS 13y ago

Can't find anything about chargebacks, wonder if they are free :)

larkarvin 13y ago
$12 for charge backs https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173584-how-much-does-it-cost-to-use-simplify-commerce- https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173584-h...

pvnick 13y ago

I wouldn't trust anything that comes from Mastercard or Visa directly. I would much rather have the companies' idiosyncrasies and politics abstracted through a 3rd-party service like stripe or balanced. That's just my kneejerk reaction, take it or leave it.

CoachRufus87 13y ago
Why not? Millions trust them with one their most important assets: cash.
- ericd 13y ago
  On the merchant side, the picture is a lot less friendly than the consumer side. With a traditional merchant account, there is basically a march of monotonically increasing fees here and there that add up, and are only brought back down a bit when someone wins against them in court.

alphamale3000 13y ago

Yes! We'll save 0.05%! That's 500$ for every million in sales. You must have huge sales to justify a switch.

memset 13y ago
If you're doing a million in sales, you should negotiate a rate with your CC provider which will be far lower than the list price. All of the providers - Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, and most likely these guys - will negotiate a rate with you, and if you're doing any volume you ought to give them a call and ask. When you call, they will ask you two important things: 1. What is your current volume (if you're looking at switching from someone else) 2. What is your chargeback rate? (How often do angry customers call the credit card company to issue a chargeback against you?) If you are growing and have increasing transaction volume, and you aren't defrauding your customers, then you can absolutely get a lower rate than you're paying now. This is true for so many things in business - the list price means nothing!

greghinch 13y ago

To play diplomat, I see a lot of Stripe loyalty / Mastercard hate already brewing here, and I think that's a bit unwarranted. Stripe has certainly earned their place as a cherished service, but I would venture to bet a lot of devs worked quite hard on Simplify as well, so it'd be nice to see discussion on the merits of the offering rather than preconceived notions of the provider. If nothing else, even if 0.05% isn't much, I'm happy to see if they can start a bit of a pricing war here. If it drives payment costs down across the board, all the better.

pc 13y ago
(I built the first version of Stripe and work here.) I think the unfortunate aspect of these clones is that they're lazy. I have huge respect for anyone that innovates in payments -- I know how hard it is, and I'd imagine it's even harder to do that as part of a larger company. What I find disappointing is when a product copies everything about Stripe -- everything from Stripe.js to the "live/test" switch to the "1/2/3" getting started pop-up when you create your account to the nomenclature of "InvoiceItems" to the ordering of tabs in the account settings. It's certainly MasterCard's (and anyone's) prerogative to do that, but I don't think it's particularly worthy of support from other engineers and makers. We should encourage each other any time we see great, original work -- creativity is hard, and new ideas are often delicate in the early days. It'd be really cool if MasterCard did that, but Simplify unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything that's new. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)
- breck 13y ago
  Two day payouts looks like a great innovation to me. :)
  - pc 13y ago
    To Stripe's discredit, that's not a new idea :-). Don't worry; we'll fix this soon.
    - melvinram 13y ago

jusben1369 13y ago

0.05% is a tiny amount. This is the first shot though across the bow on lowering the transactional rates set by Stripe, Braintree etc.

jusben1369 13y ago

"Sign up and develop. When you're ready to go live, tell us a little about your business." It's actually more of a "PayMill" model than a Stripe model. So they allow you to begin development but they don't actually promise immediate on-boarding.

ceejayoz 13y ago
Stripe does exactly the same thing. You have to enter some business details like tax ID, sales volume, etc. to go live.

diggan 13y ago

As usual, there is no information at all on which countries that is supported, I guess this is only supported in USA. Maybe I'm the only one outside of America... Edit: Yeah, after registering, confirming my email and trying to apply for a full account, I know that it's only for America. Sigh...

sleepyhead 13y ago
"At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business." https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-some-of-my-customers-are-located-outside-of-the-u-s-can-i-still-use-simplify-commerce- https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...
- diggan 13y ago
  Cool, in Support -> Home -> General, couldn't be more visible. Tried searching for "country" in the support-area, no hits, no more time spent searching.
jrgnsd 13y ago
I had to read through the Developer Terms of Use to find that out.

mattparcher 13y ago

Something that caught my eye: the name "Simplify" is pretty close to "Simple", the online bank service. Different products entirely, I realize—but heck, Simple’s twitter handle is even @simplify.

justinreeves 13y ago
That was actually what drew me to the headline. I saw "Simplify" and thought it was about my bank.
eightyone 13y ago
I made the same connection.

joelrunyon 13y ago

Jumping on this thread for a flyer. Any stripe devs know if it's possible to integrate with infusionsoft.com? That integration would make me so, so happy.

jkuria 13y ago
I completely agree. And with 1ShoppingCart too. I considered using stripe but they didn't integrate with any of the popular shopping carts that handle affiliate marketing type of features. So I have to pay for two merchant accounts and a load balancing gateway. I also live in fear of my funds being frozen any moment or losing sales if I go over my processing limit.

rudros 13y ago

Check out https://www.simplify.com// https://www.simplify.com// (the double slash ending is important).

joshrice 13y ago
What was there? Just getting a 404...or is that your point?
- rudros 13y ago
  Ahhh, they shut it down already. It was a page with links to login to their JBOSS admin pages and such. You needed passwords, of course, but still, not the sort of thing you want clients to randomly stumble across.
  - rurounijones 13y ago
    Bloody hell, that is an instant, trust destroying, security cock-up. You can set JBoss to bind to a separate IP address (i.e. one not publicly accessible etc.) for all management functions, it is a simple configuration change.

dutchbrit 13y ago

Do they also accept Maestro debit cards?

jusben1369 13y ago
US only.

gesman 13y ago

It is only supported in USA. I'm in Canada. Next please ...

jackbravo 13y ago

If MasterCard can create an international version of this product before Stripe, then this will be big.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

kawera 13y ago

At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business Oh well...

AndyJPartridge 13y ago
I was going to post the same thing. Hope Stripe get there first, as I'd like to support them over Mastercard.
sideproject 13y ago
With clones of Stripe poppin' up everywhere, I think the niche advantage would be to be able to scale the service to a number of other countries where this type of service is either expensive or unavailable (please come to Australia! - I know there is "pin", but we wouldn't mind a cheaper alternative without any monthly fees!)
- lbarrow 13y ago
  Have you looked at Braintree? We're charging 2.4% and $0.30 in Australia, with no monthly fee.
  - zemaj 13y ago
    We use Braintree, but it's a payment gateway in Australia not a full stack solution. You still need to provide your own merchant and account and deal with the endless hassles that come with it. Merchant accounts are really the hard part of accepting money in Australia at this point.
  - thejosh 13y ago
    Does it work similar to PIN/PayPal where you hold the money then deposit the money into a bank account or do you require a merchant account?
    - lbarrow 13y ago
      We work with you to get you set up with a merchant account. Unfortunately, the application process isn't instant yet like it is in the US.

zt 13y ago

I find this to be a really interesting business decision for MasterCard. MasterCard cannot offer this service directly on their information systems because of there own rules and the antitrust consent decree. So what have they done? They've built a wrapper around Priority Payments Services, an independent sales organization of Wells Fargo. (For reference, Stripe is also an ISO of Wells Fargo Merchant Services). Which is all a long way of saying that MasterCard went pretty far out of there way to build this system. They must really see value in selling directly to merchant developers. There is another possible story here: maybe the ISO wanted to compete with Stripe, they built the system and site, and asked MasterCard for their branding.

foobarqux 13y ago
Mastercard can see almost exactly how much Stripe is growing, I don't think they needed to be very perceptive in "seeing value in selling directly to merchant developers".
- zt 13y ago
  Not to be flip, but I haven't found that MasterCard or Visa are particular great at data analysis. Additionally, I would be surprised if MasterCard could easily figure out the information you suggest from the data they get. I could be completely wrong, but I've seen them have enough trouble figuring out interchange charges -- their core business -- let alone random analytic facts about (so-called) competitors. To my immediate recollection ISO 8583 (the standard set out for credit card transactions) doesn't have much info on independent sales organizations (a different ISO acronym). This is all to say that the transactions are through a merchant account set up by Stripe for each particular merchant at Wells Fargo Merchant Services, then through First Data and only then hit MasterCard. Again, I'm not certain, but I'm not sure its a question they can easily answer from their data.

larkarvin 13y ago

This is cool, but much cooler if they will support businesses outside US. it seems i'm stuck with paypal and Payment gateway in the Philippines are way too pricey for our business

tlrobinson 13y ago

BTW MasterCard has a whole bunch of other interesting APIs available: https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API

kephra 13y ago

Its still stupid credit cards. Most eCommerce sites have a profit margin of less then 10%, often around 5%. Charging 2.85% + $0.30 kills most business ideas.

jwilliams 13y ago

Restricted to US individuals and companies only... I'm not sure why sites don't call that out from the get-go.

sangaya 13y ago
It is not restricted to US individuals, just US Businesses. "Using Simplify Commerce, you can create payments with credit and debit cards carrying major card brand logos for customers anywhere in the world. At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business." [https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-some-of-my-customers-are-located-outside-of-the-u-s-can-i-still-use-simplify-commerce https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...]

chiph 13y ago

Looks like they don't handle recurring charges for you. So you'll have to be the one to hold onto the card number and jump through the PCI compliance hoops. Or go with a card vault service.

hmind 13y ago
Is it not this? https://www.simplify.com/commerce/docs/tutorial/index#recurring-payments https://www.simplify.com/commerce/docs/tutorial/index#recurr...
- chiph 13y ago
  Whoops. Didn't see that. Thanks.

techboots 13y ago

So what's the consensus on this? I'm looking to integrate either Stripe or Simplify... which service do I go with?

nwenzel 13y ago
Stripe knows how to innovate. Simplify knows how to copy. Go with Stripe.

zanny 13y ago

Give me your bitcoin address and we can have a transfer in minutes for a few satoshis or within an hour or so for free. (blahblahblah, usd, ponzie scheme, cbx halting transfers, grandmothers)

csdreamer7 13y ago

Are there any chargeback fees? (For those who don't know a fee in addition to the chargeback which is usually $25.)

NKCSS 13y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955772
- csdreamer7 13y ago
  Thankyou!

kiyanforoughi 13y ago

2.85% fees? Such a rip-off.... Braintree is much better/cheaper and offers so much more.

LukeHoersten 13y ago

Their website design looks like a hardware store site design.

rdl 13y ago

Given that they permit weapons and pornography, if they're otherwise just a direct clone of Stripe with the MasterCard brand, they're pretty awesome. I'd be fine if it cost 3.5%, but it's actually cheaper too.