[Silhouette]

I can't speak for anyone else, but the reasons we've chosen other providers over PayPal had nothing to do with their fees. I expect I'd pay 5% and shift all my existing business in a heartbeat, given a payment service that had:

1. a data model that wasn't oversimplified or awkwardly reported,

2. a decent API that also supported comprehensive automated integration tests, and

3. solid documentation and customer support.

No large, established company would pay 5%, obviously, but running small, on-line businesses without physical products, our priorities are different. A couple of percent of profit margin either way is nothing compared to the pain caused by accounting hassles and the lack of confidence if it's not possible to test an integration properly. In a small company, we're all doing everything, so any time we have to spend on accounting details or manual testing before we roll out an update is time we're not spending on things like marketing or feature development that actually make money.

[saurik]

Sure. I was responding to "It surprises me that anybody uses Amazon or PayPal when Stripe and Balanced exist.", not attempting to make the argument "It surprises me that anybody uses Stripe or Balanced when Amazon and PayPal exist.". You are welcome to make the choices you want to make, and if Stripe actually manages to accomplish that first bullet point for your use case, that's awesome (seriously). However, treeface was making the argument that the opposite was not true: that working with PayPal and Amazon never made sense due to the offerings of Balanced and Stripe being somehow better; I was explaining (with a "FWIW" even) why companies would want to choose these solutions.

[Silhouette]

Apologies if I misunderstood your point. You seemed to emphasize fees above almost anything else in your earlier posts, including suggesting that this would probably be the deciding factor in a PayPal vs. Stripe choice at a certain price point. I was only trying to point out that for the kinds of small business that a lot of these payment services are chasing, the rate they charge isn't necessarily the only relevant factor, nor even the most important one.

Sadly, I have yet to find a payment service that is anywhere close to meeting all of my three criteria, and that includes many of those that get mentioned a lot on HN. That is why if anyone made one, they would have my companies' business faster than you can say "integration". For now, we settle for a combination of helpful customer service and APIs that we can make work with enough effort, and we hope that in time the services offering those things will improve their limited reporting and testing facilities.

As for the underlying data models that most of these services use, I'm afraid most of those are probably beyond redemption, and sooner or later I can see that being a significant liability to the kinds of service that are useful primarily because they're low-hassle and let you get on with other stuff. (Friendly advice to payment services: If you bundle up a charge to my customer, any tax we have to charge them that you may or may not record, any fees you charge on that transaction, any tax you're including with those fees, any refunds that may be made on a later date and therefore in a different tax reporting period, any tax to my customer included in those refunds, any fees we get back as a result, any tax that no longer applies on those fees, any chargebacks that occur, any tax that no longer applies to my customer as a result of the charge back, any fees you're no longer collecting, any tax on those fees, any chargeback-related fees and how much you're spending on my Christmas present for putting up with this lot all in the same single transaction record in your database/API, then our accountants probably don't like you, and neither do the guys here who have to reverse engineer all of the real data that we need to do real accounts in order to make our accountants happy again. There is simple, and then there is too simple.)

[mattbarrie]

You certainly don't do any real volume, because you can't pass 5% onto customers and if you absorbed it and did any real business it would be huge $$$.