[dan-robertson]

Isn’t there actually just a tonne of complexity with handling payments once you leave the United States? In many countries there are preferred payment methods that aren’t just “enter card number, expiry, and cvv” and users are going to expect/hope to see their preferred method (and perhaps a way to get to it if the interface guesses incorrectly because eg they are on a vpn or an expat with banking relationships in their home country.) And then there are all sorts of ‘security’ things where the user must be redirected in many ways. Now multiply the complexity in payment options by the complexity in payment flows: maybe someone may get charged a variable amount up to some limit in the future (eg like a hotel or car rental) or maybe you want recurring payments (and the customer may be accustomed to using a different method for these) or maybe there is some other kind of flow I hadn’t thought of—businesses are quite diverse. And that ignores the complications of local laws and international money movement and foreign exchange and, of course, tax.

I think there are a few possible definitions for the word ‘boring’

1. Things you can’t talk about at an ordinary dinner party—math is boring

2. Things that are mundane or pedestrian—checkout at a supermarket is boring

3. Things that are simple but tedious—transferring your contacts from your Rolodex to your mobile telephone is boring

I think that because some definitions apply to stripe for the user or developer (definition 2, probably 1) it is easy to assume that definition 3 applies to the front end or the system as a whole. And surely it is a success of stripe to make their business look so trivial that people assume it is trivial. But I don’t really think that’s true.