[sulife]

Or spend a few hours, get a merchant account through a bank and authorize.net with much lower fees and a pretty standard API. Tons of classes to use authorize.net with and super simple... no point of adding ANOTHER layer... charging with a merchant account is trivial.

[dave_sullivan]

That's certainly not been my experience with setting up online billing through authorize.net (or braintree for that matter). Integration is easy enough, it's the screwing around with getting a merchant account that's a pita.

Plus, if you're a startup, you don't really know how much you're going to be selling (or not selling). It's a good idea to keep associated costs variable until you have some better benchmarks.

Stripe is unquestionably the fastest, easiest way to be able to accept credit card payments online without making yourself look like an amateur by having google checkout or the like. Not having to go through the process of getting a merchant account--and the way their fees are structured--has been a huge time and sanity saver for me, both for myself and for projects I've worked on.

[sulife]

This is how it goes... you call Chase Paymentech and sign an app and 24 hours later you have an account. WOW, tough!

[ceslami]

The light gray color of your comments should give you a hint as to how welcome they are in this community.

[sulife]

This community can't handle the truth. Instead it idolizes dumbass ideas.

[dave_sullivan]

Wow dude, you are ANGRY about something... that's fine, I get it, but you might consider looking into what that's about. It can't be much fun going through life pretending you want to fight everyone. To each their own I suppose.

[mikeash]

More like, this community doesn't appreciate sarcastic jerks who make assertions without backing them up.

[jasonkester]

By hours, I assume you mean months. It took me just shy of two months to get my merchant account set up a couple years back.

In theory, you could do it in less time, but only if you already have your business licensed, registered and a business bank account set up in exactly the right way.

But since that's part of the list of things you need to do to get a traditional payment provider set up that Stripe doesn't require, it's a little disingenuous to pretend that setup times are in any way comparable.

I set up Stripe for two of my products recently. In both cases, it was a matter of minutes to get the account verified and processing real charges from real credit cards and having them sent to my bank account.

[jusben1369]

I think it's fair to say Stripe solved 4 problems. i) The time it takes to get a merchant account. It is only 24 - 72 hours unless something really goes wrong through other channels but with Stripe it's immediate. ii) The probability you'll get a merchant account (not a slam dunk for startups but 100% with Stripe?) Many developers hate dealing with financial institutions and then getting turned down is a bit humiliating. All of that's removed and iii) A great API/documentation that people love (although a few others have that) and iv) Pricing that is very simple and straight forward.

In return for doing all that work for you their fees aren't as competitive as other alternatives. That's fair given the work they do.

[pbiggar]

I'm going to add a 5th: Being really simple. The first time I tried to figure out what a merchant account was, and a payment gateway, and all the associated fees, etc, was just exhausting.

[dangrossman]

That seems a little exaggerated... most merchant account providers get applications through underwriting in 2-3 business days. I'm not sure what "set up in exactly the right way" is since my merchant account applications only asked for the bank account # and routing #, and the first one I opened 8 years ago was tied to a consumer checking account. Opening a business bank account once I registered an LLC took less than 30 minutes at the local branch.

[saikat]

It may be worth noting (though you perhaps already know this) that our fees are all-inclusive. We don't charge extra for amex cards, international cards, qualified vs. non-qualified transactions, etc. These things often add up to make other gateways' fees higher than they seem.

Also, we have volume discounts for people processing more than a million dollars a year, so this may be something you'd be interested in.

[MBCook]

That's what a company I worked with did, and I thought it was a bad decision.

The per-transaction fees are lower, but there is a monthly (or yearly) cost. The API is big because it covers so many cases that you probably won't use.

Plus there are fees. Sure, they'll let you do e-checks (every customer wants those, right?), but that's a fee. Return? That's a fee. Chargeback? Fee. Process transactions in real-time instead of a batch at the end of the day? Fee. Log into the web interface? It's free, but it kinda slow and hard to use so you'll waste far more time that you would expect.

If you've got a business that does a lot of sales, or sales of very hight dollar items, that kind of thing can really add up. But if your sales are smaller or much more sporadic then the time investment and all the little fees may end up making Stripe cheaper. Sometime an extra 1% more than pays you back in lack of stress.

Also, for what it's worth, I remember PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon all being roughly the same as Stripe.

[dusing]

I would use stripe for my products store but with authorize.net we are on 1 day delay deposits. Stripe is 7 days. With seasonal sales and inventory/advertising costs 7 business days is a long time.

We use stripe for everything else we build for clients though, and it's awesome.

[sulife]

You can negotiate all those BS fees to $0. For example.. I pay 0.1% + interchange. $0.05 per transaction gateway fee and $0.10 cc trans fee (includes AVS). $5/mo base fee. NOTHING ELSE (well chargeback fees, everywhere has that).

You have no clue what you're talking about. I guarantee Stripe will charge you CB fees too.

Only way Stripe is worth the time and % they jack it up is if you do LOW volume.

edit: 5 seconds in google and Stripe charges $15 for a chargeback, same as Chase. Basically paying Stripe 1% + another $0.15 or so per transaction. NO THANKS! No one doing any type of CC volume would be dumb enough to give that $ away.

[dusing]

You have it right, the key for stripe is LOW volume.

[jdelsman]

It might be trivial to charge, but storing credit card details and remaining PCI compliant is a nightmare for businesses, especially at scale. Trust me -- getting audited and fined because you're not PCI complaint is much more expensive than giving the burden to another company like Stripe. Plus, Stripe is great because they don't hold your customers' data hostage.

[ianstallings]

But using a service like authorize.net usually means using their PCI-compliant storage in turn with their e-commerce service. How it works is basically the data does not have to pass through your servers exactly like stripe works. They store the data in their servers and you use a key to pass that data to the e-commerce mechanism, never seeing the actual data yourself.

If you're interested the service is called the Customer Information Manager. You can use it to store any secure data that you'd rather not be responsible for. I've used it to great success.

My main reason for my love affair with authorize.net? Recurring billing. They nailed it.

[sulife]

If 1% of your revenue is worth not spending a few hours to figure out BS PCI stuff I suggest you rethink your priorities or you're doing really low volume where 1% is like $5.

[Reebz]

It's not about figuring it out, the key thing here is transfer of risk. Its certainly won't be "bs" if you get a fine due to a breech.

[sulife]

There's about 5 million tutorials online how to do everything properly. < 1 day work for 1% of sales... HMMMMMMMMM. tough decision, not.

[zevyoura]

This kind of tone is generally looked down on here at HN. I think there's an argument to be made on your side, but you're doing an exceptionally poor job at making it in a civil and friendly way. I'm genuinely interested in the other side of the story, but you have to have the discussion in good faith.

[spitfire]

There is a good argument to be made on his side. But it's a business decision on what adds the most value for people.

For most people, they aren't (and don't want to be) experts in payment processing. Improving their product moves the needle by more than 1% for the same (or less) effort than spending time on payment processing.

[sulife]

Sorry for being honest. Would you prefer:

Stripe is an amazing service and their founders are amazing people. I wish I could blow them, but they probably wouldn't even let me b/c the VCs are already all over that. On the other hand, for people who enjoy saving money, becoming PCI compliant and saving 1% + trans fees is another alternative and there are numerous tutorials available to help anyone do that within a few hours even if you are severely autistic.

[StavrosK]

Doesn't that cost way, way too much as a one-off fee? I'd rather pay a small percentage more on each sale, as I don't have that many sales. Also, getting a merchant account appears to be too much of a hassle.

[sulife]

Uhhh, what do you mean? Go through Chase paymentech is like 1.9% or so for card not present.

[StavrosK]

I mean to set up. Also, I'm not in the US, does that work in the UK?

[sulife]

No clue about UK