15 ms·

Stripe Checkout

559 points by strzalek 13y ago

el_guapo 13y ago
too bad you can't dynamically change the price in the form.
- lachyg 13y ago
  (I worked on Checkout) You can! The docs on our custom integration are here: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom
  - el_guapo 13y ago
    I stand corrected.
  - nesbot 13y ago
    Does this allow you to change the price dynamically though? For example, if the user selects Canada for their billing address I must then add the appropriate taxes to the price dynamically. Doesn't seem like that is possible?
    - lachyg 13y ago
      I'm afraid we don't support that use-case yet. If you'd still like to use Checkout, you could use it as a method for the user to add their card, and confirm the payment amount on a separate page. (the 'amount' field is not required)
      - nesbot 13y ago
        Thanks. The form is very slick so just using it to collect the information is not half bad.
pbiggar 13y ago
At CircleCI, we've been using Stripe Checkout for quite a while. It was increadibly easy to set up and very high quality (we replaced a hacky ugly checkout page with it), and it looks really professional. That professionalism is really important at the final stage of the funnel. One of the things that's really interesting about Checkout is that Stripe is actively focusing on increasing the conversion rate for us. Their new layout (with the phone number) has a 20% high conversion rate than the previous version.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  can you explain what you mean by 'with the phone number'? Just curious.
  - pc 13y ago
    Try watching the animation (click "Show me" on the page). Basically, we use your email address and phone number to save you from having to type in your credit card number everywhere.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - duiker101 13y ago
      Is there any way to avoid that even if you don't remember the credit card?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
scott_karana 13y ago
Looks like a Humble Bundle 12 is inbound soon, based on their screenshot! :)
steerj92 13y ago
Stripe Checkout is amazing. Used it for a few months and it's worked extremely well. Glad they are constantly updating it. Looks even better than it did before.
corkill 13y ago
Can this UI/checkout be used for updating CC info as well?
- pc 13y ago
  Yup, it can. You can have the button text say whatever you like.
slowernet 13y ago
Anyone know if they are they using an open source tool to run the intro animation? Can't tell from the minified source.
- pc 13y ago
  We coded it from scratch.
  - slowernet 13y ago
    Nicely executed, and very effective.
  - nlh 13y ago
    Looks great. Broadly speaking, can you talk about what you used? Just raw CSS animations / transitions?
mikeg8 13y ago
Hot damn. The design and experience I felt from this page is overwhelmingly great. I've always loved stripe's design and they continue to blow me away. Really excited to activate our account any day now.
- haptiK 13y ago
  I too was blown away by the presentation. Top notch development.
RafiqM 13y ago
Checkout is a great way to get started fast (like, in <15 mins). Multilingual support would be great, and also a more customer friendly interface for those who might not be familiar with things like CVCs. Those two things are reasons I had to stop using checkout and use stripe.js instead.
- lachyg 13y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We're continually pushing optimizations, and have plans to make the CVC interface friendlier for those that are unfamiliar!
PandaChi 13y ago
We set it up over here @Patreon and it was EZPZ. One issue that wasn't clear from the documentation -- the "custom" setup (https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom) is preferable for so many reasons (and it's no harder to setup, not sure why it's not just the only option) -- it doesn't "take over" the form so that a credit card is required on submit and it also returns a bunch more relevant info like the last 4 digits of the credit card, the expiration date, etc. so you can save and display the card info for future checkouts.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > it also returns a bunch more relevant info like the last 4 digits of the credit card, the expiration date, etc. so you can save and display the card info for future checkouts I believe you can get all that out of the token Stripe gives you with Checkout. It's certainly available in the dashboard for a Checkout charge.
yahelc 13y ago
I've been using Stripe Checkout now for a few months now, and besides the lack of built-in support for coupon codes, it's pretty perfect.
tindrlabs 13y ago
Now I'd just love for you all to make capable of having products attached to it and operate like a shopping cart ;) -- But seriously your designs look so good, I'd actually want that.
giulianob 13y ago
I really want to use Stripe but it would be great if they had a more favorable pricing structure for microtransactions. Paypal, for example, will charge 5%+$0.05 or 2.9%+$0.30 (whichever is lowest) for digital goods transactions.
- RafiqM 13y ago
  They have a workaround here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-microtransactions-and-will-my-fees-be-the-same https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-mic... It mightn't suit your use case though.
  - giulianob 13y ago
    Won't work since it's many customers.
- bunkerbewohner 13y ago
  This. You basically have to use PayPal or Amazon Payments when you're dealing with microtransactions if you don't want to lose up to 40% just in processing fees. The workarounds with bundling transactions don't really work for my use case.
  - tomasien 13y ago
    Incorrect! You can now use Knoxpayments.com and micro-transactions are free - enjoy!
    - objclxt 13y ago
      Yeah, no. Does that site support credit/debit card transactions? Nope. ACH / bank transfer payments are a non-starter for many people and sites, and conversion rates are much lower. I'm pretty sure the OP was referring to credit/debit transactions...
      - tomasien 13y ago
dirtae 13y ago
Stripe Checkout is nice, but unfortunately it's not suitable for us, since the "Remember me" checkbox cannot be hidden. "Remember me" is confusing for users. What is being remembered? By whom? When you're dealing with users who may already be concerned about whether it's secure to enter their credit card number into your website, I feel like the "Remember me" box is just adding another layer of confusion and concern. I'm surprised that the "Remember me" checkbox can't be hidden, given how focused on their customers Stripe normally is. The "Remember me" checkbox feels like something Stripe is pushing on me to help them with their business objectives, which isn't the vibe I usually get when dealing with Stripe.
- j21 13y ago
  I use Stripe Checkout myself, but I think if you make your own form you're be able to leave 'remember me' out. Correct me if I'm wrong though, haven't made a custom form in a while. https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/forms https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/forms
- pc 13y ago
  [Tl;dr on the below: the changes we make to Checkout are designed to increase our merchants' revenue. If a change doesn't do that, it will be reverted.] The confusion point you cite was our biggest concern in building the "Remember me" functionality. On the one hand, it's clearly good for our merchants* if customers don't have to constantly retype their card details. On the other hand, it'd be bad if we were scaring them away with something confusing. So we've been testing Checkout for months. After tons of testing across different sites, types of business, and devices, we're confident that "Remember me" does not harm conversion rate. On the contrary -- all the evidence we have shows that it increases it. If a business has a lot of returning customers, this effect can be very big. For example: we ran an experiment that simply removed the "Remember me" option on Humble Bundle, and determined that they would make less money without it. To your point about being focused on customers: our rule is to always do what's best for the merchant. I want to really emphasize this point, because I believe it very strongly. The strategy tax example you cite is precisely what we insist we can't do, and where we believe other companies and products have gone wrong. We've discussed the possibility of allowing users to hide the "Remember me" checkbox, and our belief is that having that option is probably not the best thing for the merchant. We consider it our job to optimize the Checkout in order to maximize our users' revenue. If we add more options, we can easily end up with something confusing and inconsistent. Having a ton of configuration options would also make it harder to pursue other ideas and avenues. The whole point of Checkout is to enable ongoing iteration and improvement. As a result, we'd much rather make the macro guarantee ("we'll work on increasing your revenue"), and build the infrastructure that enables us to do that, rather than forcing merchants to guess what particular tweaks might work best. Still, even though we've leaned against doing so thus far, we're by no means strongly opposed to removing it. Perhaps, for example, we should have an option that doesn't show "Remember me" but will pre-fill the details if they've been entered elsewhere. Again -- our goal is just to do what's best for the merchant. * We generally don't like the term merchant, but I'll use it here for clarity.
akumen 13y ago
How's Stripe for SaaS billing of multiple plans with option to pay on a monthly, quaterly and annual basis with appropriate discounts?
- brianlweiner 13y ago
  Pretty easy, you can have various subscriptions and define the billing interval and prices as you wish.
- benmccann 13y ago
  They're great the first time you charge someone. But there are things that can be really hard when you try to add seats to an account or do renewals. E.g. one thing that I know has been really frustrating to our engineers is that they don't support applying a discount amount per seat.
vassvdm 13y ago
Hey pc, do you plan to add escrow to Stripe Checkout at some point?
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  That seems like an odd feature request, but maybe I'm just not thinking of a use case.
  - vassvdm 13y ago
    The use case is for marketplaces (and maybe crowdfunding sites). An escrow service is a means to increase trust for both the buyer and seller sides. Funds are paid up front but held in escrow until goods are effectively exchanged or services rendered. I realize that it is a major feature and requires more than just code, but I'd love to see another major player in this space that isn't PayPal. Balanced Payments and MangoPay are great but they aren't household names (that customers are likely to recognize) like Stripe is fast becoming.
    - kickme444 13y ago
      Stripe does exactly this. When you make a payment to stripe it does into your account which is an escrow account, which you can then use to make payments to others, like a marketplace setting.
elithrar 13y ago
I'm particularly happy that iOS Chrome is now a "first class citizen". There were some shaky times before where it (provided you saved your form) showed the mobile view that Safari gets; then where it failed completely (with a JS alert()); where it showed the desktop modal (okay, but a bit janky) and finally where it had a made-for-mobile modal. I'm a big fan of Checkout otherwise: it's definitely simplified things for me. I'd just like to see more communication regarding changes: I discovered most of those myself from my staging site.
- waylonrobert 13y ago
  I'm trying to understand why Stripe didn't send out an e-mail to all merchants before making this change. I, too, was blindsided.
  - pc 13y ago
    Hm, we did send an email to all Checkout users. If you didn't get one, please let me know. (patrick@stripe.com.)
nakodari 13y ago
The checkout on mobile app looks great. Too bad this cannot be used to unlock functionality in the app after payment, it will be rejected by Apple.
- mfkp 13y ago
  That was my initial thought too. "How would this work on mobile if it's not giving Apple a 30% cut?" Turns out "mobile" means "mobile web", not to be used in-app.
betadreamer 13y ago
Love the design and simple integration. Would be exciting to see a shopping cart / coupon features some time in the future.
api 13y ago
This has existed for a while, and I'm using it on my site. Didn't know it was "beta." Works great. (Still in test mode though, have not yet exited beta so I'm not taking anyone's money yet.)
rs 13y ago
Have been using Checkout on https://deployer.vc https://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io https://zoned.io - it's absolutely excellent: very easy to integrate, and looks really good. Will be switching over the other products as well over from PayPal.
thebiglebrewski 13y ago
I use Stripe Checkout at postperfect.co. The only thing I really wish it could handle was a discount code implementation, which I had to do myself unfortunately.
notastartup 13y ago
so how do I integrate this to my website ? I am currently using https://www.paymentiframe.com/ https://www.paymentiframe.com/ because the form looks really nice like a credit card form.
- sahaskatta 13y ago
  I'm not a security expert, but using a random 3rd party's IFRAME on your website to process payments through Stripe sounds INCREDIBLY dangerous. I would advise simply using Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout Simply paste their code into your HTML and you are about done. There's no other backend code, etc. required to make it work.
kailuowang 13y ago
From your video, I noticed that on a smart phone, you authenticate user by sending a code through text. Isn't that redundant? Whoever has that phone will get that text..
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Whatever API they are using the get the phone number without the user entering it on mobile is probably easy to spoof. It may not even work on all platforms and the user may have to type a phone number in that case. Would you trust a phone number handed to you by a PhoneGap JavaScript method, for example? It would be pretty easy to tweak to return whatever is needed.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    The mobile number is entered by the user on his first purchase, not retrieved from the device itself. I don't think any device exposes phone numbers to browser APIs at all.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  That's exactly the goal. Only the registered phone can be used for purchases using your saved CC data.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Whoever has that phone will get that text. Not someone who stole the remember-me cookie off the phone, though.
dcaunt 13y ago
This is seriously awesome! I don't want to detract, but it's a shame that your https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout page isn't optimised for mobile. I wanted to have a look at the demo on my phone as well as on my desktop.
saluki 13y ago
First off I'm a huge stripe fan I recommend them to clients daily. I contacted stripe about an option to disable remember me on an existing stripe checkout form at the request of a client. I was very surprised stripe said that wasn't going to be an option. They said we tested it and it will increase your conversions so it's not going to be optional. Not very stripe like at all. I can understand it being on by default to move things toward their business goals. And it even looks like a nice feature. But for it to be required doesn't seem friendly. Being developer focused I would expect stripe would appreciate having control over the look and feel of your checkout process. I'd like to hear an explanation of the issue it would cause stripe if it was on by default but they provided a flag to turn it off like some of the other checkout fields. Thanks again for a great product.
- pc 13y ago
  Hey Saluki -- I elabore a bit on the motivation behind this in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349895. > Being developer focused I would expect stripe would appreciate having control over the look and feel of your checkout process. I completely agree! Stripe always has and always will let you have complete control over every pixel of the look and feel. In order to enable us to experiment and optimize with Checkout, we can't enable as much experimentation and customization there. But if you'd like to build your own flow, we'd love to help enable it :-).
  - saluki 13y ago
    Thanks for the response . . . When I look at https://stripe.com/docs/checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout I see the simple integration and custom integration . . . under custom it would be great to have an option for data-remember-me false I expect stripe has enough traffic to experiment and optimize with remember me being on by default on most stripe checkout forms. Being a developer it's a simple addition for stripe to make for more flexibility . . . if it's enabled by default I expect it would be active on most of your checkout forms. I just don't see a reason not to offer this option. It might not affect conversions on 90% of checkout forms. But it is affecting conversions for clients signing up for stripe. I have existing clients asking for it to be removed . . . and new clients asking for it to be turned off on their stripe checkout. Granted we could all roll our own forms without it but checkout is one of the big selling points for getting new clients to sign up for stripe is how fast it is to setup with stripe checkout. I guess it would be interesting to hear an explanation of why it isn't an option since you offer similar options for the 'custom' stripe checkout form. Why would offering this option be bad for stripe? Thanks again for a great product.
colinprince 13y ago
Killer detail "donate to Watsi" Well played.
downandout 13y ago
Now if they only did same/next day payouts. The founder once said this was possible if you emailed him. I emailed him and got zero response, from him or anyone else, so I'm guessing they are only doing this for super high volume merchants.
- pc 13y ago
  Oh no, I'm sorry. I've no idea what happened. Want to try my personal email? patrick@collison.ie.
  - asenna 13y ago
    Hi Patrick, is there any timeline for international payout support? I am currently working on a marketplace project and I'm looking for options other than PayPal.
  - downandout 13y ago
    Thanks Patrick, I will try again.
  - riteshpatel 13y ago
    Hey Patrick, Any chance this is possible for us as well? This is the only reason we're using PayPal for the majority of transactions at the moment. Thanks, Ritesh
toddmorey 13y ago
The demo of checkout available at https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout uses a canvas element for the demo animation. It's a really well done walkthrough. Was it entirely custom-coded or done using a framework / tool to help?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- wdewind 13y ago
  Is it? I don't see any canvas. Would be interested as well...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- callmevlad 13y ago
  It looks like the canvas is only there to render the background gradient. Pretty sure all the animation is done via CSS3.
- benjamindc 13y ago
  The canvas element is only used on Chrome as it has a hard time rendering animations above a big CSS radial-gradient. The whole animation is just using DOM elements, CSS transitions/animations and requestAnimationFrame. And yes, entirely handmade :)
  - davidwparker 13y ago
    If the code is modular enough, would you mind open sourcing it (or blogging about how you developed it)?
    - benjamindc 13y ago
      The code has been specifically made for that particular animation and, to be fair, it wasn’t even modular enough for my own needs :D Joking aside, I’d love to blog about it and more generally about animations in UIs.
jusben1369 13y ago
PC is this cross merchant? That is, if one end user of a Stripe merchant stores their card and then that same end user visits another Stripe merchant are they remembered? I see "Stripe stores your card for this site and others" or wording like that.
- lachyg 13y ago
  It is -- Stripe stores the details across all sites that use Checkout.
snake_plissken 13y ago
I still don't completely understand how Stripe can be so cheap. How do they pass charges onto payment processors without incurring some sort of fee that is not equal to the market rate for all other transactions? Is there some sort of fee scale on the processor side that decreases as the transaction amount increases?
- digikata 13y ago
  I'm guessing you could renegotiate the rate based upon taking on some of the liabilities. e.g. if Stripe says, hey if we take on all the cost of fraudulent transactions, can we get a discount for the transactions we send through your network?
subsection1h 13y ago
> We've been testing this for the past couple of months—our hypothesis was that it would increase conversion rates—and we're delighted that it has been confirmed. pc, do you know if the conversion rates increased for the majority of the subscription-based sites that you monitored? Our company has a subscription-based service that uses Stripe Checkout, and some of our customers have expressed confusion regarding the "Remember me" feature. Even the CEO of our company expressed confusion initially, and he requested that I ask Stripe for the option of hiding the "Remember me" field. From their perspective, there's no reason why their payment information should be remembered because they have no reason to enter their payment information again in the future since our service is subscription-based. I think the "Remember me" feature would be less confusing at an e-commerce site where customers may make additional purchases in the future. Also, we'd like to be able to hide the customer's email address in Stripe Checkout, not just disable the email address field. So essentially, we want the old Stripe Checkout that only requested payment information.
- pc 13y ago
  > pc, do you know if the conversion rates increased for the majority of the subscription sites that you monitored? We did look at the effect on individual sites (rather than across all charges as a whole). But I generally agree with you that it'd be nice to have something better-tailored to subscription website flows. (I suspect that this product might look quite different to Checkout.)
  - Chris_Newton 13y ago
    FWIW, I don’t see any particular problem with using a Checkout-style process for subscriptions. We used it for that from the start, and looking through this discussion it seems we’re far from the only ones. For us, the big win was having a reasonably polished and ready-made form to get from zero to having a card token, which meant one fewer thing for us to worry about during integration (and building the rest of our site, of course). That seems just as valuable whether you’re accepting single payments or signing people up for a subscription.
bliti 13y ago
Does this replace gumroad (and services alike)?
jeff18 13y ago
We've been using Stripe Checkout at Humble Bundle for quite a while and it has been awesome. It is really easy to set up and once a customer has used it, it's incredibly easy to checkout in the future. Every couple weeks I hear about a new A/B test that is running to try to make it even better.
- dmunoz 13y ago
  Small question about Humble Bundle's usage of Stripe: what prompted the move from requiring only the CC, expiration date and CVV, to full name and address? I was disappointed to see that.
  - jeff18 13y ago
    We are very sensitive to fraud, and a few bad apples found the checkout a little too low friction. ;)
Lightbody 13y ago
Is this different than "regular Stripe"? I watched the quick demo and I thought that was what Stripe has been doing for a while now?
ROFISH 13y ago
Is there a method of inserting the address if it's already known? (Such as saved customer data or another form element?)
- lachyg 13y ago
  Not yet, though this is definitely on the near-term roadmap.
nhangen 13y ago
Interesting move by Stripe, and I guess it explains why WePay and Balanced choose to focus on the API and not their d2c offerings. With the 'remember me' feature, Stripe has chosen to impede upon the territory of their developers, which greatly concerns me. I love their product, but one of the reasons I choose to use them is because of the options that their API provides. Is this a back-end play to eventually cut out developers, or is it designed to help them sell more product? I'm sure Stripe staffers will say that it's the latter, but if that's the case, who is the primary customer for this offering?
- pc 13y ago
  This move was directly motivated by our users telling us that they want us to help fix payments on mobile devices. If you want to use Checkout (it's completely optional, and will always be), we think it can help you a lot here. Checkout contains the smallest amount of Stripe branding possible. > Is this a back-end play to eventually cut out developers That's crazy! We built a new feature in response to feedback from developers. Nothing is going away. Can you imagine ways of doing this better? (I'd genuinely love to hear suggestions.)
kaa2102 13y ago
I am getting ready to launch a product. I was using Wepay until they eliminated their checkout form. Switched to Stripe, read up on the API, and implemented the form. Now you tell me their is a simple checkout widget available. Sigh.
ruok0101 13y ago
We use Stripe checkout at http://leaddyno.com http://leaddyno.com for subscription signups using the custom integration features of the checkout widget. We also use it in our app for customers to update their billing information. Its great they made such an awesome widget and ALSO made it very easy to customize and integrate programmatically! We love it!
igotwater 13y ago
Does anyone know if there is a similar API that would allow people to send money to other people?
- asenna 13y ago
  I would suggest Venmo by Braintree.
pyrrhotech 13y ago
how does this differ from V.me by Visa?
AliAdams 13y ago
I dont get it - Why is this different from stripe.js ?
dmjio 13y ago
If you put $0.00 as the amount it changes the button text to say "add card"
badgercapital 13y ago
Stripe is awesome. We use stripe on VidFall.com... our alpha launch is on 3/10, would love to see you there.
chenster 13y ago
I suppose your site still needs to have SSL in order to use Checkout?
- pc 13y ago
  Yep.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  Is a $7 SSL cert really that big of a barrier?
  - lachyg 13y ago
    We do require SSL for Stripe.js usage as well -- Checkout is built on top of Stripe.js, so it has the same set of security requirements.
useraccount 13y ago
I think Stripe just ate Gumroad's lunch.
higherpurpose 13y ago
When is Stripe coming to the whole EU?
chenster 13y ago
Nice, Checkout is great for Ad-hoc payment. I'm using WordPress Easy Digital Download plugin that already has Stripe support. EDD automatically creates user account, and tracks usages, and sends confirmation and download emails to buyers.
return0 13y ago
How about taking a photo of the credit card and using OCR to fill up the form?
- bunkerbewohner 13y ago
  You mean like http://card.io/ http://card.io/?
  - return0 13y ago
    Yep, just like that
quaffapint 13y ago
Looking back at my sales, too many customers use Paypal to simply go to Stripe only. I wish someone would make something that is as easy to use as Stripe but also offers Paypal. The few I've seen are still everything and the kitchen sink, not just a simple stripe + paypal combo.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Looking back at my sales, too many customers use Paypal to simply go to Stripe only. I'd be curious as to how many you'd lose by ditching PayPal versus how many would just go ahead and put in a CC.
higherpurpose 13y ago
Is there a Stripe plugin for this for Woocommerce themes?
aslakhellesoy 13y ago
Stripe checkout is great, but I really miss the ability to add custom fields to the form, such as VAT number and Company name. I realise that allowing to add a whole bunch of fields can hamper usability, but I have to collect the VAT number in order to figure out how much to charge the customer. Does anyone have a recommendation about what to do here? Roll our own form and lose all the nice stuff from Stripe Checkout? Display a new form for VAT after displaying checkout, and charge after that?
castlegrove 13y ago
Released just as I finish our custom checkout process...but hey, I'm glad to see it!
grimmfang 13y ago
I know it's been said but this is a absolute masterpiece. Thank you for inspiration Stripe.
ajju 13y ago
Very interesting. Since Checkout brings in an element of the developer contributing a user to Stripe via 'remember me', I'd love to know the tradeoff here. What is the probability today, that when a user of my app hits Checkout, they will already have a credit card saved which makes signup faster?
Pitic 13y ago
TL;DR: +1 on making the "Remember me" checkbox optional. I'll try to offer a slight variation on what others have already mentioned regarding checkout. Like many of them I find Stripe to be very well thought out and easy to implement. As far as Checkout goes, the idea is great but it might need some updates in order to make it more useful to a wider audience. As other mentioned, the "Remember me" function was enough for me to not use Checkout. It is confusing, perhaps because it introduces a mental shift in the user's mind, where out of a sudden they need to understand how this other company "Stripe" will magically keep their info across devices. A way to hide that field wouldn't harm anyone (other than Stripe's ability to do branding). It would also be nice to allow style customization of the form.
scurvy 13y ago
While this is admirable, it flies in the face of security-based UX. For years we've taught people to only send sensitive information over SSL, and to look for the lock, green bar, etc. Now you're asking people to blindly punch information into a box and hit send?
blantonl 13y ago
Carl Icahn's "request" to spin Paypal out of Ebay is probably looking better with this announcement. Paypal really needs a new leadership team that promotes innovation. Stripe is cleaning up, and I'm about to take a lot of business to Stripe...
benmcnelly 13y ago
My name being Ben and a stripe, dribble & humble bundle user, I had to open in an incognito window to double check that it wasn't scraping my name somehow..
patio11 13y ago
This is a really bright idea, in that almost all companies do an absolutely bloody abysmal job of implementing their checkout flow. The median testing budget for it is generally zero, unless you scope the population to "large, savvy ecommerce providers." I love the idea of being able to basically take advantage of the herd effect for optimization, and clearly there are non-linear advantages to the Stripe ecosystem, because getting credential/CC pairs into the system most probably increases systemwide spend on them and that is how both merchants and Stripe make their money. I'm probably going to try this in Bingo Card Creator in an A/B test against my existing purchase flow at some point. I'll be honest: the likelihood of the average English teacher knowing Stripe does give me a bit of pause with regards to the UX and the prospects of my VA having to answer a lot of "Who is Stripe and why are you telling them my credit card number? Did your Googles get a virus?" emails. Still, seems like it is worth testing. Worse comes to worse, all you do is go back to the pre-existing checkout flow, like whatever Stripe.js integration you're using right now, and then you have full control over the experience. I have seen and supervised successful redesigns of purchase experiences before. They print money. BCC got a 60% or so lift in purchases using a Stripe-powered checkout back in the day, after some hillclimbing, discovery of synergistic effects, and burning the kinks out of my integration. I think there's likely motivational numbers hiding in a lot of your businesses. You should absolutely be testing them on a regular basis yourselves, but this seems to be a decent stab at a way of doing testing without requiring focus/bandwidth or major traffic [+], which are two major reasons people give me for not testing. [+] I have noticed many people suggesting "You could do per-account multivariate testing on e.g. whether the Remember Me button is a win or not", and feel obligated to point out "That will probably only work for accounts which are doing, minimally, thousands of transactions a month." The great thing about this is that if you've got only 2k visits a month and 40 purchases if we assume that systemwide performance is a good proxy for your performance (and n.b. that's an assumption which is tractable to measurement) then we can still get solid test results by using the other millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of transactions flowing through the system every $PERIOD.
- bmj1 13y ago
  Background: I spent the last 2.5 years working as a product manager at another payments company. I've integrated Stripe.js in various side projects. I saw first hand what happens when you make a checkout highly customisable (dozens of options): you introduce huge complexity cost. Here are some ways this manifests: - longer dev cycles/increased difficulty in testing/more frequent release rollbacks - higher merchant support costs - harder to innovate - a need to support dozens of legacy use-cases that only some merchants use - harder to onboard new merchants - more complex sales process - inconsistent user experience for customers - higher staff training costs/time - impossible to optimise conversion for the majority, as each merchant is showing a different checkout. It all starts with 1 option, but it's a slippery slope. In summary, I think Stripe are probably taking the right approach here, and I wish them the best of luck.
reillyse 13y ago
So couple of comments on stripe checkout. 2 big issues. First off, the entering of email addresses and remember me stuff is confusing for my customers. We sign up people for a free trial and take their credit card details before we sign them up as users. Even quite technical people have dropped out of the flow after signing in with stripe thinking "I've given them my email" and so people haven't properly finished the signup process because of this (I'm guessing I can probably get this email, however I'd still need to prompt them for a password). The second big issue is that the constant changing of the form kept breaking various integration/acceptance tests that I had written. This was pretty frustrating as it seemed that I would get a different box from time to time and my tests would start failing. I get the desire to A/B test, and the desire to build a network of users who have already given their credit card details (obviously amazing for mobile) but it would be nice for us customers if we had a flag where we could switch it off.
x13 13y ago
Stripe is pretty sweet, and we're in their beta to receive funds in two days. Any idea how they actually do this? Two is certainly faster that the normal seven days, and I'd love any insight or theories from the HN community.
analog31 13y ago
Ask HN: I run a tiny home business making widgets. My web page, including order form, is pure HTML. From what I can tell (looking at page source for the Watsi example), at the very least in order to use Stripe, I have to add some JavaScript to my web page, and of course test it. Granted, that shouldn't be a big problem for a skilled web developer, but I'm not one. Am I understanding it right?
- fallenhitokiri 13y ago
  You need some lines of JavaScript you can basically copy 1:1 from the docs (or if you scroll down the linked page there is also an example). But you also need some backend to handle the actual payment. The widget generates a token which you can use to create customers, charge them etc. One implementation from Stripes docs https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/guides/flask https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/guides/flask
rmccue 13y ago
I'm not a fan of the payment input in a separate window, although I'm not sure if that's just a browser quirk on my end. Much preferred the old modal dialog on the same page.
tlogan 13y ago
May I ask a honest question: why did you add email and remember me? It looks something like VCs will suggest. This makes me no to trust Stripe as platform. Somebody smart said: the incumbent are wounded by the first disruptor and that disruptor eventually becomes the same as the incumbent and, then, both are killed by the real disruptor.
hoprocker 13y ago
Awesome. Kind of like an embeddable software Square. Bravo.
koa 13y ago
ASK: I love the UX for the stripe checkout. It seems like the integration script creates a full page iframe allowing the widget to have full control over the UX. Is there any guide to building a similar full page iframe widget for other applications?
BvS 13y ago
Does this work internationally (eg international phone numbers + translated explanation)?
chuckouellet 13y ago
If you need a more advanced shopping cart, there is Snipcart that can connect to Stripe, https://snipcart.com https://snipcart.com The cart is fully responsive so it works on mobile as well! I am one of the founders, let me know if you have any questions.
piratebroadcast 13y ago
Can this form be used for recurring billing situations? Like $1.99 a month?

Stripe Checkout

559 points by strzalek 13y ago

el_guapo 13y ago

too bad you can't dynamically change the price in the form.

lachyg 13y ago
(I worked on Checkout) You can! The docs on our custom integration are here: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom
- el_guapo 13y ago
  I stand corrected.
- nesbot 13y ago
  Does this allow you to change the price dynamically though? For example, if the user selects Canada for their billing address I must then add the appropriate taxes to the price dynamically. Doesn't seem like that is possible?
  - lachyg 13y ago
    I'm afraid we don't support that use-case yet. If you'd still like to use Checkout, you could use it as a method for the user to add their card, and confirm the payment amount on a separate page. (the 'amount' field is not required)
    - nesbot 13y ago
      Thanks. The form is very slick so just using it to collect the information is not half bad.

pbiggar 13y ago

At CircleCI, we've been using Stripe Checkout for quite a while. It was increadibly easy to set up and very high quality (we replaced a hacky ugly checkout page with it), and it looks really professional. That professionalism is really important at the final stage of the funnel. One of the things that's really interesting about Checkout is that Stripe is actively focusing on increasing the conversion rate for us. Their new layout (with the phone number) has a 20% high conversion rate than the previous version.

jrochkind1 13y ago
can you explain what you mean by 'with the phone number'? Just curious.
- pc 13y ago
  Try watching the animation (click "Show me" on the page). Basically, we use your email address and phone number to save you from having to type in your credit card number everywhere.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - duiker101 13y ago
    Is there any way to avoid that even if you don't remember the credit card?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

scott_karana 13y ago

Looks like a Humble Bundle 12 is inbound soon, based on their screenshot! :)

steerj92 13y ago

Stripe Checkout is amazing. Used it for a few months and it's worked extremely well. Glad they are constantly updating it. Looks even better than it did before.

corkill 13y ago

Can this UI/checkout be used for updating CC info as well?

pc 13y ago
Yup, it can. You can have the button text say whatever you like.

slowernet 13y ago

Anyone know if they are they using an open source tool to run the intro animation? Can't tell from the minified source.

pc 13y ago
We coded it from scratch.
- slowernet 13y ago
  Nicely executed, and very effective.
- nlh 13y ago
  Looks great. Broadly speaking, can you talk about what you used? Just raw CSS animations / transitions?

mikeg8 13y ago

Hot damn. The design and experience I felt from this page is overwhelmingly great. I've always loved stripe's design and they continue to blow me away. Really excited to activate our account any day now.

haptiK 13y ago
I too was blown away by the presentation. Top notch development.

RafiqM 13y ago

Checkout is a great way to get started fast (like, in <15 mins). Multilingual support would be great, and also a more customer friendly interface for those who might not be familiar with things like CVCs. Those two things are reasons I had to stop using checkout and use stripe.js instead.

lachyg 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're continually pushing optimizations, and have plans to make the CVC interface friendlier for those that are unfamiliar!

PandaChi 13y ago

We set it up over here @Patreon and it was EZPZ. One issue that wasn't clear from the documentation -- the "custom" setup (https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom https://stripe.com/docs/checkout#integration-custom) is preferable for so many reasons (and it's no harder to setup, not sure why it's not just the only option) -- it doesn't "take over" the form so that a credit card is required on submit and it also returns a bunch more relevant info like the last 4 digits of the credit card, the expiration date, etc. so you can save and display the card info for future checkouts.

ceejayoz 13y ago
> it also returns a bunch more relevant info like the last 4 digits of the credit card, the expiration date, etc. so you can save and display the card info for future checkouts I believe you can get all that out of the token Stripe gives you with Checkout. It's certainly available in the dashboard for a Checkout charge.

yahelc 13y ago

I've been using Stripe Checkout now for a few months now, and besides the lack of built-in support for coupon codes, it's pretty perfect.

tindrlabs 13y ago

Now I'd just love for you all to make capable of having products attached to it and operate like a shopping cart ;) -- But seriously your designs look so good, I'd actually want that.

giulianob 13y ago

I really want to use Stripe but it would be great if they had a more favorable pricing structure for microtransactions. Paypal, for example, will charge 5%+$0.05 or 2.9%+$0.30 (whichever is lowest) for digital goods transactions.

RafiqM 13y ago
They have a workaround here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-microtransactions-and-will-my-fees-be-the-same https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-mic... It mightn't suit your use case though.
- giulianob 13y ago
  Won't work since it's many customers.
bunkerbewohner 13y ago
This. You basically have to use PayPal or Amazon Payments when you're dealing with microtransactions if you don't want to lose up to 40% just in processing fees. The workarounds with bundling transactions don't really work for my use case.
- tomasien 13y ago
  Incorrect! You can now use Knoxpayments.com and micro-transactions are free - enjoy!
  - objclxt 13y ago
    Yeah, no. Does that site support credit/debit card transactions? Nope. ACH / bank transfer payments are a non-starter for many people and sites, and conversion rates are much lower. I'm pretty sure the OP was referring to credit/debit transactions...
    - tomasien 13y ago

dirtae 13y ago

Stripe Checkout is nice, but unfortunately it's not suitable for us, since the "Remember me" checkbox cannot be hidden. "Remember me" is confusing for users. What is being remembered? By whom? When you're dealing with users who may already be concerned about whether it's secure to enter their credit card number into your website, I feel like the "Remember me" box is just adding another layer of confusion and concern. I'm surprised that the "Remember me" checkbox can't be hidden, given how focused on their customers Stripe normally is. The "Remember me" checkbox feels like something Stripe is pushing on me to help them with their business objectives, which isn't the vibe I usually get when dealing with Stripe.

j21 13y ago
I use Stripe Checkout myself, but I think if you make your own form you're be able to leave 'remember me' out. Correct me if I'm wrong though, haven't made a custom form in a while. https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/forms https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/forms
pc 13y ago
[Tl;dr on the below: the changes we make to Checkout are designed to increase our merchants' revenue. If a change doesn't do that, it will be reverted.] The confusion point you cite was our biggest concern in building the "Remember me" functionality. On the one hand, it's clearly good for our merchants* if customers don't have to constantly retype their card details. On the other hand, it'd be bad if we were scaring them away with something confusing. So we've been testing Checkout for months. After tons of testing across different sites, types of business, and devices, we're confident that "Remember me" does not harm conversion rate. On the contrary -- all the evidence we have shows that it increases it. If a business has a lot of returning customers, this effect can be very big. For example: we ran an experiment that simply removed the "Remember me" option on Humble Bundle, and determined that they would make less money without it. To your point about being focused on customers: our rule is to always do what's best for the merchant. I want to really emphasize this point, because I believe it very strongly. The strategy tax example you cite is precisely what we insist we can't do, and where we believe other companies and products have gone wrong. We've discussed the possibility of allowing users to hide the "Remember me" checkbox, and our belief is that having that option is probably not the best thing for the merchant. We consider it our job to optimize the Checkout in order to maximize our users' revenue. If we add more options, we can easily end up with something confusing and inconsistent. Having a ton of configuration options would also make it harder to pursue other ideas and avenues. The whole point of Checkout is to enable ongoing iteration and improvement. As a result, we'd much rather make the macro guarantee ("we'll work on increasing your revenue"), and build the infrastructure that enables us to do that, rather than forcing merchants to guess what particular tweaks might work best. Still, even though we've leaned against doing so thus far, we're by no means strongly opposed to removing it. Perhaps, for example, we should have an option that doesn't show "Remember me" but will pre-fill the details if they've been entered elsewhere. Again -- our goal is just to do what's best for the merchant. * We generally don't like the term merchant, but I'll use it here for clarity.

akumen 13y ago

How's Stripe for SaaS billing of multiple plans with option to pay on a monthly, quaterly and annual basis with appropriate discounts?

brianlweiner 13y ago
Pretty easy, you can have various subscriptions and define the billing interval and prices as you wish.
benmccann 13y ago
They're great the first time you charge someone. But there are things that can be really hard when you try to add seats to an account or do renewals. E.g. one thing that I know has been really frustrating to our engineers is that they don't support applying a discount amount per seat.

vassvdm 13y ago

Hey pc, do you plan to add escrow to Stripe Checkout at some point?

ceejayoz 13y ago
That seems like an odd feature request, but maybe I'm just not thinking of a use case.
- vassvdm 13y ago
  The use case is for marketplaces (and maybe crowdfunding sites). An escrow service is a means to increase trust for both the buyer and seller sides. Funds are paid up front but held in escrow until goods are effectively exchanged or services rendered. I realize that it is a major feature and requires more than just code, but I'd love to see another major player in this space that isn't PayPal. Balanced Payments and MangoPay are great but they aren't household names (that customers are likely to recognize) like Stripe is fast becoming.
  - kickme444 13y ago
    Stripe does exactly this. When you make a payment to stripe it does into your account which is an escrow account, which you can then use to make payments to others, like a marketplace setting.

elithrar 13y ago

I'm particularly happy that iOS Chrome is now a "first class citizen". There were some shaky times before where it (provided you saved your form) showed the mobile view that Safari gets; then where it failed completely (with a JS alert()); where it showed the desktop modal (okay, but a bit janky) and finally where it had a made-for-mobile modal. I'm a big fan of Checkout otherwise: it's definitely simplified things for me. I'd just like to see more communication regarding changes: I discovered most of those myself from my staging site.

waylonrobert 13y ago
I'm trying to understand why Stripe didn't send out an e-mail to all merchants before making this change. I, too, was blindsided.
- pc 13y ago
  Hm, we did send an email to all Checkout users. If you didn't get one, please let me know. (patrick@stripe.com.)

nakodari 13y ago

The checkout on mobile app looks great. Too bad this cannot be used to unlock functionality in the app after payment, it will be rejected by Apple.

mfkp 13y ago
That was my initial thought too. "How would this work on mobile if it's not giving Apple a 30% cut?" Turns out "mobile" means "mobile web", not to be used in-app.

betadreamer 13y ago

Love the design and simple integration. Would be exciting to see a shopping cart / coupon features some time in the future.

api 13y ago

This has existed for a while, and I'm using it on my site. Didn't know it was "beta." Works great. (Still in test mode though, have not yet exited beta so I'm not taking anyone's money yet.)

rs 13y ago

Have been using Checkout on https://deployer.vc https://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io https://zoned.io - it's absolutely excellent: very easy to integrate, and looks really good. Will be switching over the other products as well over from PayPal.

thebiglebrewski 13y ago

I use Stripe Checkout at postperfect.co. The only thing I really wish it could handle was a discount code implementation, which I had to do myself unfortunately.

notastartup 13y ago

so how do I integrate this to my website ? I am currently using https://www.paymentiframe.com/ https://www.paymentiframe.com/ because the form looks really nice like a credit card form.

sahaskatta 13y ago
I'm not a security expert, but using a random 3rd party's IFRAME on your website to process payments through Stripe sounds INCREDIBLY dangerous. I would advise simply using Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout Simply paste their code into your HTML and you are about done. There's no other backend code, etc. required to make it work.

kailuowang 13y ago

From your video, I noticed that on a smart phone, you authenticate user by sending a code through text. Isn't that redundant? Whoever has that phone will get that text..

lnanek2 13y ago
Whatever API they are using the get the phone number without the user entering it on mobile is probably easy to spoof. It may not even work on all platforms and the user may have to type a phone number in that case. Would you trust a phone number handed to you by a PhoneGap JavaScript method, for example? It would be pretty easy to tweak to return whatever is needed.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  The mobile number is entered by the user on his first purchase, not retrieved from the device itself. I don't think any device exposes phone numbers to browser APIs at all.
ricardobeat 13y ago
That's exactly the goal. Only the registered phone can be used for purchases using your saved CC data.
ceejayoz 13y ago
> Whoever has that phone will get that text. Not someone who stole the remember-me cookie off the phone, though.

dcaunt 13y ago

This is seriously awesome! I don't want to detract, but it's a shame that your https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout page isn't optimised for mobile. I wanted to have a look at the demo on my phone as well as on my desktop.

saluki 13y ago

First off I'm a huge stripe fan I recommend them to clients daily. I contacted stripe about an option to disable remember me on an existing stripe checkout form at the request of a client. I was very surprised stripe said that wasn't going to be an option. They said we tested it and it will increase your conversions so it's not going to be optional. Not very stripe like at all. I can understand it being on by default to move things toward their business goals. And it even looks like a nice feature. But for it to be required doesn't seem friendly. Being developer focused I would expect stripe would appreciate having control over the look and feel of your checkout process. I'd like to hear an explanation of the issue it would cause stripe if it was on by default but they provided a flag to turn it off like some of the other checkout fields. Thanks again for a great product.

pc 13y ago
Hey Saluki -- I elabore a bit on the motivation behind this in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7349895. > Being developer focused I would expect stripe would appreciate having control over the look and feel of your checkout process. I completely agree! Stripe always has and always will let you have complete control over every pixel of the look and feel. In order to enable us to experiment and optimize with Checkout, we can't enable as much experimentation and customization there. But if you'd like to build your own flow, we'd love to help enable it :-).
- saluki 13y ago
  Thanks for the response . . . When I look at https://stripe.com/docs/checkout https://stripe.com/docs/checkout I see the simple integration and custom integration . . . under custom it would be great to have an option for data-remember-me false I expect stripe has enough traffic to experiment and optimize with remember me being on by default on most stripe checkout forms. Being a developer it's a simple addition for stripe to make for more flexibility . . . if it's enabled by default I expect it would be active on most of your checkout forms. I just don't see a reason not to offer this option. It might not affect conversions on 90% of checkout forms. But it is affecting conversions for clients signing up for stripe. I have existing clients asking for it to be removed . . . and new clients asking for it to be turned off on their stripe checkout. Granted we could all roll our own forms without it but checkout is one of the big selling points for getting new clients to sign up for stripe is how fast it is to setup with stripe checkout. I guess it would be interesting to hear an explanation of why it isn't an option since you offer similar options for the 'custom' stripe checkout form. Why would offering this option be bad for stripe? Thanks again for a great product.

colinprince 13y ago

Killer detail "donate to Watsi" Well played.

downandout 13y ago

Now if they only did same/next day payouts. The founder once said this was possible if you emailed him. I emailed him and got zero response, from him or anyone else, so I'm guessing they are only doing this for super high volume merchants.

pc 13y ago
Oh no, I'm sorry. I've no idea what happened. Want to try my personal email? patrick@collison.ie.
- asenna 13y ago
  Hi Patrick, is there any timeline for international payout support? I am currently working on a marketplace project and I'm looking for options other than PayPal.
- downandout 13y ago
  Thanks Patrick, I will try again.
- riteshpatel 13y ago
  Hey Patrick, Any chance this is possible for us as well? This is the only reason we're using PayPal for the majority of transactions at the moment. Thanks, Ritesh

toddmorey 13y ago

The demo of checkout available at https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout uses a canvas element for the demo animation. It's a really well done walkthrough. Was it entirely custom-coded or done using a framework / tool to help?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
wdewind 13y ago
Is it? I don't see any canvas. Would be interested as well...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
callmevlad 13y ago
It looks like the canvas is only there to render the background gradient. Pretty sure all the animation is done via CSS3.
benjamindc 13y ago
The canvas element is only used on Chrome as it has a hard time rendering animations above a big CSS radial-gradient. The whole animation is just using DOM elements, CSS transitions/animations and requestAnimationFrame. And yes, entirely handmade :)
- davidwparker 13y ago
  If the code is modular enough, would you mind open sourcing it (or blogging about how you developed it)?
  - benjamindc 13y ago
    The code has been specifically made for that particular animation and, to be fair, it wasn’t even modular enough for my own needs :D Joking aside, I’d love to blog about it and more generally about animations in UIs.

jusben1369 13y ago

PC is this cross merchant? That is, if one end user of a Stripe merchant stores their card and then that same end user visits another Stripe merchant are they remembered? I see "Stripe stores your card for this site and others" or wording like that.

lachyg 13y ago
It is -- Stripe stores the details across all sites that use Checkout.

snake_plissken 13y ago

I still don't completely understand how Stripe can be so cheap. How do they pass charges onto payment processors without incurring some sort of fee that is not equal to the market rate for all other transactions? Is there some sort of fee scale on the processor side that decreases as the transaction amount increases?

digikata 13y ago
I'm guessing you could renegotiate the rate based upon taking on some of the liabilities. e.g. if Stripe says, hey if we take on all the cost of fraudulent transactions, can we get a discount for the transactions we send through your network?

subsection1h 13y ago

> We've been testing this for the past couple of months—our hypothesis was that it would increase conversion rates—and we're delighted that it has been confirmed. pc, do you know if the conversion rates increased for the majority of the subscription-based sites that you monitored? Our company has a subscription-based service that uses Stripe Checkout, and some of our customers have expressed confusion regarding the "Remember me" feature. Even the CEO of our company expressed confusion initially, and he requested that I ask Stripe for the option of hiding the "Remember me" field. From their perspective, there's no reason why their payment information should be remembered because they have no reason to enter their payment information again in the future since our service is subscription-based. I think the "Remember me" feature would be less confusing at an e-commerce site where customers may make additional purchases in the future. Also, we'd like to be able to hide the customer's email address in Stripe Checkout, not just disable the email address field. So essentially, we want the old Stripe Checkout that only requested payment information.

pc 13y ago
> pc, do you know if the conversion rates increased for the majority of the subscription sites that you monitored? We did look at the effect on individual sites (rather than across all charges as a whole). But I generally agree with you that it'd be nice to have something better-tailored to subscription website flows. (I suspect that this product might look quite different to Checkout.)
- Chris_Newton 13y ago
  FWIW, I don’t see any particular problem with using a Checkout-style process for subscriptions. We used it for that from the start, and looking through this discussion it seems we’re far from the only ones. For us, the big win was having a reasonably polished and ready-made form to get from zero to having a card token, which meant one fewer thing for us to worry about during integration (and building the rest of our site, of course). That seems just as valuable whether you’re accepting single payments or signing people up for a subscription.

bliti 13y ago

Does this replace gumroad (and services alike)?

jeff18 13y ago

We've been using Stripe Checkout at Humble Bundle for quite a while and it has been awesome. It is really easy to set up and once a customer has used it, it's incredibly easy to checkout in the future. Every couple weeks I hear about a new A/B test that is running to try to make it even better.

dmunoz 13y ago
Small question about Humble Bundle's usage of Stripe: what prompted the move from requiring only the CC, expiration date and CVV, to full name and address? I was disappointed to see that.
- jeff18 13y ago
  We are very sensitive to fraud, and a few bad apples found the checkout a little too low friction. ;)

Lightbody 13y ago

Is this different than "regular Stripe"? I watched the quick demo and I thought that was what Stripe has been doing for a while now?

ROFISH 13y ago

Is there a method of inserting the address if it's already known? (Such as saved customer data or another form element?)

lachyg 13y ago
Not yet, though this is definitely on the near-term roadmap.

nhangen 13y ago

Interesting move by Stripe, and I guess it explains why WePay and Balanced choose to focus on the API and not their d2c offerings. With the 'remember me' feature, Stripe has chosen to impede upon the territory of their developers, which greatly concerns me. I love their product, but one of the reasons I choose to use them is because of the options that their API provides. Is this a back-end play to eventually cut out developers, or is it designed to help them sell more product? I'm sure Stripe staffers will say that it's the latter, but if that's the case, who is the primary customer for this offering?

pc 13y ago
This move was directly motivated by our users telling us that they want us to help fix payments on mobile devices. If you want to use Checkout (it's completely optional, and will always be), we think it can help you a lot here. Checkout contains the smallest amount of Stripe branding possible. > Is this a back-end play to eventually cut out developers That's crazy! We built a new feature in response to feedback from developers. Nothing is going away. Can you imagine ways of doing this better? (I'd genuinely love to hear suggestions.)

kaa2102 13y ago

I am getting ready to launch a product. I was using Wepay until they eliminated their checkout form. Switched to Stripe, read up on the API, and implemented the form. Now you tell me their is a simple checkout widget available. Sigh.

ruok0101 13y ago

We use Stripe checkout at http://leaddyno.com http://leaddyno.com for subscription signups using the custom integration features of the checkout widget. We also use it in our app for customers to update their billing information. Its great they made such an awesome widget and ALSO made it very easy to customize and integrate programmatically! We love it!

igotwater 13y ago

Does anyone know if there is a similar API that would allow people to send money to other people?

asenna 13y ago
I would suggest Venmo by Braintree.

pyrrhotech 13y ago

how does this differ from V.me by Visa?

AliAdams 13y ago

I dont get it - Why is this different from stripe.js ?

dmjio 13y ago

If you put $0.00 as the amount it changes the button text to say "add card"

badgercapital 13y ago

Stripe is awesome. We use stripe on VidFall.com... our alpha launch is on 3/10, would love to see you there.

chenster 13y ago

I suppose your site still needs to have SSL in order to use Checkout?

pc 13y ago
Yep.
ceejayoz 13y ago
Is a $7 SSL cert really that big of a barrier?
- lachyg 13y ago
  We do require SSL for Stripe.js usage as well -- Checkout is built on top of Stripe.js, so it has the same set of security requirements.

useraccount 13y ago

I think Stripe just ate Gumroad's lunch.

higherpurpose 13y ago

When is Stripe coming to the whole EU?

chenster 13y ago

Nice, Checkout is great for Ad-hoc payment. I'm using WordPress Easy Digital Download plugin that already has Stripe support. EDD automatically creates user account, and tracks usages, and sends confirmation and download emails to buyers.

return0 13y ago

How about taking a photo of the credit card and using OCR to fill up the form?

bunkerbewohner 13y ago
You mean like http://card.io/ http://card.io/?
- return0 13y ago
  Yep, just like that

quaffapint 13y ago

Looking back at my sales, too many customers use Paypal to simply go to Stripe only. I wish someone would make something that is as easy to use as Stripe but also offers Paypal. The few I've seen are still everything and the kitchen sink, not just a simple stripe + paypal combo.

ceejayoz 13y ago
> Looking back at my sales, too many customers use Paypal to simply go to Stripe only. I'd be curious as to how many you'd lose by ditching PayPal versus how many would just go ahead and put in a CC.

higherpurpose 13y ago

Is there a Stripe plugin for this for Woocommerce themes?

aslakhellesoy 13y ago

Stripe checkout is great, but I really miss the ability to add custom fields to the form, such as VAT number and Company name. I realise that allowing to add a whole bunch of fields can hamper usability, but I have to collect the VAT number in order to figure out how much to charge the customer. Does anyone have a recommendation about what to do here? Roll our own form and lose all the nice stuff from Stripe Checkout? Display a new form for VAT after displaying checkout, and charge after that?

castlegrove 13y ago

Released just as I finish our custom checkout process...but hey, I'm glad to see it!

grimmfang 13y ago

I know it's been said but this is a absolute masterpiece. Thank you for inspiration Stripe.

ajju 13y ago

Very interesting. Since Checkout brings in an element of the developer contributing a user to Stripe via 'remember me', I'd love to know the tradeoff here. What is the probability today, that when a user of my app hits Checkout, they will already have a credit card saved which makes signup faster?

Pitic 13y ago

TL;DR: +1 on making the "Remember me" checkbox optional. I'll try to offer a slight variation on what others have already mentioned regarding checkout. Like many of them I find Stripe to be very well thought out and easy to implement. As far as Checkout goes, the idea is great but it might need some updates in order to make it more useful to a wider audience. As other mentioned, the "Remember me" function was enough for me to not use Checkout. It is confusing, perhaps because it introduces a mental shift in the user's mind, where out of a sudden they need to understand how this other company "Stripe" will magically keep their info across devices. A way to hide that field wouldn't harm anyone (other than Stripe's ability to do branding). It would also be nice to allow style customization of the form.

scurvy 13y ago

While this is admirable, it flies in the face of security-based UX. For years we've taught people to only send sensitive information over SSL, and to look for the lock, green bar, etc. Now you're asking people to blindly punch information into a box and hit send?

blantonl 13y ago

Carl Icahn's "request" to spin Paypal out of Ebay is probably looking better with this announcement. Paypal really needs a new leadership team that promotes innovation. Stripe is cleaning up, and I'm about to take a lot of business to Stripe...

benmcnelly 13y ago

My name being Ben and a stripe, dribble & humble bundle user, I had to open in an incognito window to double check that it wasn't scraping my name somehow..

patio11 13y ago

This is a really bright idea, in that almost all companies do an absolutely bloody abysmal job of implementing their checkout flow. The median testing budget for it is generally zero, unless you scope the population to "large, savvy ecommerce providers." I love the idea of being able to basically take advantage of the herd effect for optimization, and clearly there are non-linear advantages to the Stripe ecosystem, because getting credential/CC pairs into the system most probably increases systemwide spend on them and that is how both merchants and Stripe make their money. I'm probably going to try this in Bingo Card Creator in an A/B test against my existing purchase flow at some point. I'll be honest: the likelihood of the average English teacher knowing Stripe does give me a bit of pause with regards to the UX and the prospects of my VA having to answer a lot of "Who is Stripe and why are you telling them my credit card number? Did your Googles get a virus?" emails. Still, seems like it is worth testing. Worse comes to worse, all you do is go back to the pre-existing checkout flow, like whatever Stripe.js integration you're using right now, and then you have full control over the experience. I have seen and supervised successful redesigns of purchase experiences before. They print money. BCC got a 60% or so lift in purchases using a Stripe-powered checkout back in the day, after some hillclimbing, discovery of synergistic effects, and burning the kinks out of my integration. I think there's likely motivational numbers hiding in a lot of your businesses. You should absolutely be testing them on a regular basis yourselves, but this seems to be a decent stab at a way of doing testing without requiring focus/bandwidth or major traffic [+], which are two major reasons people give me for not testing. [+] I have noticed many people suggesting "You could do per-account multivariate testing on e.g. whether the Remember Me button is a win or not", and feel obligated to point out "That will probably only work for accounts which are doing, minimally, thousands of transactions a month." The great thing about this is that if you've got only 2k visits a month and 40 purchases if we assume that systemwide performance is a good proxy for your performance (and n.b. that's an assumption which is tractable to measurement) then we can still get solid test results by using the other millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of transactions flowing through the system every $PERIOD.

bmj1 13y ago
Background: I spent the last 2.5 years working as a product manager at another payments company. I've integrated Stripe.js in various side projects. I saw first hand what happens when you make a checkout highly customisable (dozens of options): you introduce huge complexity cost. Here are some ways this manifests: - longer dev cycles/increased difficulty in testing/more frequent release rollbacks - higher merchant support costs - harder to innovate - a need to support dozens of legacy use-cases that only some merchants use - harder to onboard new merchants - more complex sales process - inconsistent user experience for customers - higher staff training costs/time - impossible to optimise conversion for the majority, as each merchant is showing a different checkout. It all starts with 1 option, but it's a slippery slope. In summary, I think Stripe are probably taking the right approach here, and I wish them the best of luck.

reillyse 13y ago

So couple of comments on stripe checkout. 2 big issues. First off, the entering of email addresses and remember me stuff is confusing for my customers. We sign up people for a free trial and take their credit card details before we sign them up as users. Even quite technical people have dropped out of the flow after signing in with stripe thinking "I've given them my email" and so people haven't properly finished the signup process because of this (I'm guessing I can probably get this email, however I'd still need to prompt them for a password). The second big issue is that the constant changing of the form kept breaking various integration/acceptance tests that I had written. This was pretty frustrating as it seemed that I would get a different box from time to time and my tests would start failing. I get the desire to A/B test, and the desire to build a network of users who have already given their credit card details (obviously amazing for mobile) but it would be nice for us customers if we had a flag where we could switch it off.

x13 13y ago

Stripe is pretty sweet, and we're in their beta to receive funds in two days. Any idea how they actually do this? Two is certainly faster that the normal seven days, and I'd love any insight or theories from the HN community.

analog31 13y ago

Ask HN: I run a tiny home business making widgets. My web page, including order form, is pure HTML. From what I can tell (looking at page source for the Watsi example), at the very least in order to use Stripe, I have to add some JavaScript to my web page, and of course test it. Granted, that shouldn't be a big problem for a skilled web developer, but I'm not one. Am I understanding it right?

fallenhitokiri 13y ago
You need some lines of JavaScript you can basically copy 1:1 from the docs (or if you scroll down the linked page there is also an example). But you also need some backend to handle the actual payment. The widget generates a token which you can use to create customers, charge them etc. One implementation from Stripes docs https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/guides/flask https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/guides/flask

rmccue 13y ago

I'm not a fan of the payment input in a separate window, although I'm not sure if that's just a browser quirk on my end. Much preferred the old modal dialog on the same page.

tlogan 13y ago

May I ask a honest question: why did you add email and remember me? It looks something like VCs will suggest. This makes me no to trust Stripe as platform. Somebody smart said: the incumbent are wounded by the first disruptor and that disruptor eventually becomes the same as the incumbent and, then, both are killed by the real disruptor.

hoprocker 13y ago

Awesome. Kind of like an embeddable software Square. Bravo.

koa 13y ago

ASK: I love the UX for the stripe checkout. It seems like the integration script creates a full page iframe allowing the widget to have full control over the UX. Is there any guide to building a similar full page iframe widget for other applications?

BvS 13y ago

Does this work internationally (eg international phone numbers + translated explanation)?

chuckouellet 13y ago

If you need a more advanced shopping cart, there is Snipcart that can connect to Stripe, https://snipcart.com https://snipcart.com The cart is fully responsive so it works on mobile as well! I am one of the founders, let me know if you have any questions.

piratebroadcast 13y ago

Can this form be used for recurring billing situations? Like $1.99 a month?