[ed_at_work]

It was painful. I'm mostly referring to legacy apps like online bill payment and stuff, especially ones that also wanted to do ACH transactions. You had to sign up with some sort of "payment gateway". Usually they had an api spec of XML or other legacy web services, file formats for interchange, etc that filled a whole binder. Since many people didn't want the compliance hassle of storing credit card & ach info, this was still 'easier' to implement.

Stripe pretty much came along and crapped on all of that ( in a good way ). And lowered the barrier to entry so indie dev shops could accept CC payments seamlessly as the other big megacorps.