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Python and Flask are great, but the secret ingredient here seems to be Stripe. His goal was payment processing, and Stripe made everything else nearly trivial.
by freyr 13y ago
Python and Flask are great, but the secret ingredient here seems to be Stripe. His goal was payment processing, and Stripe made everything else nearly trivial.
- lurchpop 13y agoAgreed. This is freakin' magic: try: charge = stripe.Charge.create( amount=int(product.price * 100), currency='usd', card=stripe_token, description=email) except stripe.CardError, e: return """..err..""" print charge
- jknupp 13y agoI could not agree more. Stripe = insanely awesome payment processor. With all the heavy lifting they do, I'm now unsure what something like Gumroad's value proposition is, considering I'm basically at feature parity with them (aside from PDF stamping, which I don't do anyway).
- ericd 13y agoThere are more people who don't know how to code than do.
- hownottowrite 13y agoGreat article. Last summer I put together a concept app for a micro-coding marketplace using Python and Flask. Stripe made taking payments insanely simple.
- semerda 13y agoDitto. Stripe rocks! Simple to integrate and get it up and running in few mins.
- vsl 13y agoGlobal availability. After a few years, Stripe is still only available in a handful of countries. If you live in a country that is not only not US (tier 1 for pretty much everything), but not even the handful of high-priority countries like Canada or UK, your options are greatly reduced. For me, for example, it's PayPal or FastSpring - I would love to use Stripe, but I simply can't.
- Goopplesoft 13y agoWhich part of this is 'magic'? Serious question. That seems like standard python api client + standard payment processor api.
- whichdan 13y agoFor those of us who've used Authorize.net in the past, a simple API client is essentially magic.
- NDizzle 13y agoI agree. Maybe I'm getting to be one of those old unix dudes or something, but I was doing something that was essentially exactly the same in 2000 using Lotusscript on Domino 4.6. You gather params, post it somewhere, check out the response, and display it. It gets fancier with age, but it's essentially the same thing.
- abritishguy 13y agoTake a look at the paypal api. Also the stripe_token is pretty magic, it lets you make charges to customer credit cards without storing the card details or having to take them to an external payment page.
- nardi 13y agoHave you actually ever integrated with a payment processor before? I have. I agree that this is magical.
- Goopplesoft 13y agoI use Stripe on my site https://gauthify.com https://gauthify.com (first I used a while back, sticky to change) I use Braintree at my current job. I used to work for Balanced. I know payment processors. Its just times have changed and this kind of thing is now quite standard. But 'magical' is of opinion, I was just inquiring what he found magical.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
- reinhardt 13y agoThat's the part I didn't get: he says he wrote this to replace three different processors. If Stripe is a payment processor, what exactly did he replace?
- jknupp 13y agoSorry, the terminology is confusing. What I replaced are the digital goods checkout services (that use processors like Stripe in the backend). They help you manage and sell digital goods, by, for example, generating a unique token for each purchase so that every customer has a different download URL. Clearly, as seen here, they don't add much value.
- rahimnathwani 13y agoGumroad charges 5% + 25¢ per transaction. Compared with Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢, it's expensive, but Gumroad appears to do two things that Stripe doesn't: - Work out whether and how much sales tax to charge (which I guess should be easy if you operate in only one state) - Absorb chargeback fees This second one makes the 5% seem more reasonable.