[rubergly]

Stripe gets a lot of love here on HN, and it's almost universally praised as having no faults and being better than Paypal in every single way. And yet I never see anyone discuss the experience for users. I actually really like the ability to use Paypal on a site to pay without entering my credit card information to yet another source of potential hacking. If a site that allowed Paypal payments moved to Stripe, I would actually find that frustrating and inconvenient. Developers seem quick to praise Stripe as perfect because it does seem to be close to that in the facet they deal with (on the development and merchant end); I understand that developers save a ton more time by switching to Stripe than users lose by having to enter their payment information, but your users really shouldn't have to be concerned with that detail. That being said, I do really like Stripe, but I worry that they'll grow complacent and never expand into the user-facing features because the huge success they've had in other aspects means no one is really pushing them to grow into those areas.

[citricsquid]

I wonder if people are often scared of Paypal, even after it's become so entrenched in online payments. I would think the process for the average user (regardless of payment system used) is:

1. Do I want to purchase from this website 2. Do I trust this website to provide my payment info to it

If they use Stripe, there is no real "signal" that it is Stripe, the user thinks it is part of the website, the website they have already decided to trust. If a user answers yes to 1 and 2 with Stripe then they will purchase. With Paypal there is another step:

3. Do I trust Paypal to provide my payment info to it?

The user first has to trust the website and then trust Paypal, whereas with Stripe they only have to trust the website (because they don't know what Stripe is, and as long as they remain on the website they assume it's the same thing). So there is an extra step that the user can be turned off at, even if only 1 in 10 people answer yes to 1 and 2 but then no to 3 it can be significant.

Might be a crazy theory... but it seems plausible. Although at the same time quite a lot of people (my parents for example) trust Paypal and any website that uses Paypal, so it could be the case that the value of the Paypal brand negates the customer loss of people that have never heard of Paypal and decide they don't trust it.

[simonbrown]

I trust Paypal more than most websites. They take steps like using SSL site-wide (with HSTS) and X-Frame-Options, for example, which a lot of e-commerce websites don't. Of course, this is negated if the user doesn't trust Paypal, or doesn't understand what it does.

Website owners probably dislike the loss in branding when using Paypal, which makes them look less professional.

[omarchowdhury]

The best option might be have a branded checkout using Stripe, and an option to pay with PayPal for those who maintain PayPal accounts.

[billycoover]

Not a bad idea. As a site owner, I prefer to have my checkout branded as my site. I'm not a fan of the paypal experience. It feels cheap. However I certainly understand that people prefer paypal over stripe or other payment systems. To say "use our checkout system, or pay with paypal" would be fine if the site owner wants to support it.

I've had a lot of people ask about integrating other payment platforms into Pay Pad. I'd love to build Pay Pad in a way that was platform agnostic. Just choose your payment provider/gateway and you're off.

We'll see what happens. If enough people want it, I'll do it I'm sure.

[Negitivefrags]

We launched with both Paypal and Stripe. Over about 70,000 transactions it has been an almost exact 50/50 split between the two payment methods.

I can't say for sure how many people would not have paid only given one of those options, but I'm sure it's a non trivial number.

[johns]

It might be convenient, but patio11's anecdata suggests using Stripe can dramatically outperform Paypal or Google Checkout: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/06/stripe-and-ab-testing-ma... (of course this will vary depending on the site)

[erangalp]

Stripe and Paypal are 2 different payment options. It's not either / or - you can have both available for your users. Paypal users can chose Paypal, while the rest can enter use their credit-card without leaving your site - which is huge plus, considering Paypal's relatively high friction process for credit-card payments.

[BryanB55]

I dont consider stripe to be a paypal replacement. I consider it more of an authorize.net replacement. If I were to start using stripe we would probably still offer PayPal and CC through stripe.

[pbreit]

Good point. Many here love to hate PayPal but you know what? It's a better checkout experience when integrated decently. I wouldn't be surprised if Stripe figures out a clever way to act as a "wallet".